First Old Dame (robustly). "Knitting! I am learning to shoot!"
OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
Sir John Lubbock, whose Life, by Mr. Horace Hutchinson, Macmillan publishes in two volumes, was one of the most honourable men who figured in public life during the last half-century. He was also one of the most widely honoured. Under his name on the title-page of the book appears a prodigious paragraph in small type enumerating the high distinctions bestowed upon him by British and foreign literary and scientific bodies. Forestalling the leisure of a bank-holiday I have counted the list and find it contains no fewer than fifty-two high distinctions, one for every week of the year. These were won not by striking genius or brilliant talent. Sir John Lubbock, to preserve a name which the crowning honour of the peerage did not displace in the public mind, was by nature and daily habit constitutionally industrious. After Eton he joined his father's banking business. In his diary under date Christmas Day, 1852, being the nineteenth year of his age, he gives an account of how he spends his day. It is too long to quote, but, beginning by "getting up at half-past six," it includes steady reading in natural history, poetry, political economy, science, mathematics and German. Breakfast, luncheon and tea are mentioned in due course; but there is no reference to dinner or supper. These functions were doubtless regarded by the young student as frivolous waste of time.
I knew Lubbock personally during his long membership of the House of Commons. He had neither grace of diction nor charm of oratory. But he had a way of getting Bills through all their stages which exceeded the average attained by more attractive speakers. In his references to Parliamentary life he mentions that Gladstone, when he proposed to abolish the Income Tax, told him that he intended to meet the deficiency partly by increase of the death duties. That was a fundamental principle of the Budget Lord Randolph Churchill prepared during his brief Chancellorship of the Exchequer. It was left to Sir William Harcourt to realise the fascinating scheme, later to be extended by Mr. Lloyd George. Another of Lord Randolph's personally unfulfilled schemes was the introduction of one-pound notes. In a letter dated 16th December, 1886, he confidentially communicated his project to Lubbock. When his book reaches its second edition Mr. Hutchinson will have an opportunity of correcting a misapprehension set forth on page 48. He writes that, on June 21st, 1895, "all were startled by an announcement that Mr. Gladstone had resigned and that Parliament was to be dissolved." The surprise was not unnatural since Lord Rosebery was Prime Minister at this memorable crisis.
I can see some good in most people, but none whatever in those chairmen of meetings who, being put up to introduce distinguished speakers, thoroughly well worth listening to, feel called upon to delay matters by making lengthy speeches themselves. I propose to be quite brief in announcing Professor Stephen Leacock on Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich (Lane). Conceive this arch-humourist let loose, if so rough a term may be applied to so delicate a wit, among the sordid and fleshly plutocracy of a progressive American city; imagine his polished satire expending itself on such playful themes as the running of fashionable churches on strictly commercial lines, dogma and ritualism being so directed and adapted as to leave the largest possible dividends on the Special Offertory Cumulative Stock, and your appetite will be whetted for an intellectual feast of the most delicious flavour. For myself, I found a certain quiet but intense delight in the first five stories, episodes in the lives of individual billionaires; but when I came to the last three, which dealt with the class as a collective whole, then I became frankly and noisily hilarious. I am not given to being tiresome in the reading-room; it is another of the unforgivable offences; but I defy any man of intelligence to read those chapters and retain even a fair remnant of self-control.
The Lighter Side of School Life (Foulis) is one of the merriest and shrewdest books that I have met for a long time. Mr. Ian Hay pleasantly dedicates his work "to the members of the most responsible, the least advertised, the worst paid, and the most richly rewarded profession in the world"; and you will not have turned two pages before discovering that the writer of them knows pretty thoroughly what he is writing about. For my own part I claim to have some experience both of schoolmasters and boys, and I can say at once that the former at least have seldom been dealt with more faithfully than by Mr. Hay. His chapter on "Some Form Masters" is a thing of the purest joy; bitingly true, yet withal of a kindly sympathy with his victims. One would say that he knows boys as well, were it not for the conviction that to imagine any kind of understanding of Boydom is (if my contemporaries will forgive me) the last enchantment of the middle-aged, and the most fallacious. As for the Educational experts, he has all the cold and calculated hate for them that is the mark of experience. I admired especially his treatment of the "craze for practical teaching," the theory which holds, for example, that, instead of postulating a fixed relation between the circumference of a circle and its diameter, a teacher should supply his boys with several ordinary tin canisters, a piece of string and a ruler, and leave the form to work out their own result. Decidedly, Mr. Hay has seen The Lighter Side of School Life with the eye of knowledge; and when I mention that your own eyes will here encounter a dozen pictures by Mr. Lewis Baumer at his delightful best—well, I suppose, enough said.