ed why it was that when poetry, which he pictured as "primroses and violets," found abundance of nourishment even in the

and how ill botany is likely to serve the writer who flies heedlessly to it for literary symbols. Figures of speech are pregnant with possibilities (I myself had better be very careful here), and those likely to show most distress over their progeny are the unlucky fathers. For the first thing expected of any literary expression is that it should be faithful to what is in the mind, and

children as a profitable pastime. Children, of course, should be taught to express themselves in writing, and simply, lucidly, and with sincerity. Yet all editors know the delusion is common with beginners in journalism that the essay, a form in which perhaps only six writers have been successful in the history of English letters, is but a prelude to serious work, a holiday before the realities have begun. They all attempt it. Every editorial letter-box i

of the neighbourhoods where many babies are born, as are faith, hope, and credulity, those virtues that cause the enormous circulations of the picture papers, and form the ready material for the careers of statesmen and the glory of famous soldiers. It is more unusual. We see it as often as we do comets and signs in the heavens, a John in the Wilderness again, pastors who would die for their lambs, women who contemn the ritual and splendour of man-slaying, and