ing that the multitude, unaccustomed to make distinctions, accepts
them as authorities on the hundred other things of which they know
nothing. Thus, to take a crude example, the New York Police, which is,
without doubt, learned in its own world, and well-adapted and equipped
for asserting its authority there, sometimes intrudes, with its
well-known _bonhomie_, into the worlds of drama and sculpture, and,
because it is an acknowledged judge of crooks and grafters, presumes
to be a judge and censor also of new plays and nude statues.

Of course, the New York Police is absurd in such a character, absurd as
a bull in a china-shop is absurd; yet, as in the case of the bull with
the china, it is capable of doing quite a lot of damage.

I take the New York Police merely, as I said, as a crude example of,
doubtless, well-meant, but entirely misplaced energy. Actually, however,
it is scarcely more absurd than many similar, if more distinguished,
bulls gaily crashing about on higher planes.

Such are statesmen who, because they are Prime Ministers or Presidents,
deem themselves authorities on everything within the four winds, doctors
of divinity, and general _arbitri elegantiarum_.

Such a bull in a china-shop in regard to literature was the late Mr.
Gladstone. It is no disrespect towards his great and estimable character
to say, that while, of course, he was technically a scholar--"great
Homeric scholar" was the accepted phrase for him--there were probably
few men in England so devoid of the literary sense. Yet for an author to
receive a post-card of commendation from Mr. Gladstone meant at least
the sale of an edition or two, and a certain permanency in public
appreciation. Her late Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria was Mr.
Gladstone's only rival as the literary destiny of the time. To Mr.
Gladstone we owe Mrs. Humphry Ward, to Her Majesty we owe Miss Marie
Corelli.

John Ruskin, much as we may admire him for his moral influence, and
admire, or not admire, him for his prose, was a bull in a china-shop
when he made his famous criticism on Whistler, and thus inadvertantly
added to the gaiety of nations by provoking that delightful trial,
which, farcical as it seemed at the moment, not merely evoked from
Whistler himself some imperishable dicta on art and the relation of
critics to art, but really did something towards the long-drawn
awakening of that mysterious somnolence called the public consciousness
on the strange mission