But if I find it, as I protest
I do, rather agreeable than otherwise, why should I spoil my pleasure
by stringing vain words about it? Swift and the broomstick--yes. But
that essay was done at the behest of a clever woman, and to annoy the
admirers of Robert Boyle. Besides, it was hardly--or do you think it
was?--worth the trouble of doing it. There was no trouble involved?
Possibly. But I am not the Dean. And anyhow the fact that he never did
anything of the kind again may be taken to imply that he would not be
bothered. So would not I, if I had a deanery.

That is an hypothesis I am tempted to pursue. I should like to fill
my allotted space before reaching the tiresome theme I have set
myself ... A deanery, the cawing of rooks, their effect on the nervous
system, Trollope's delineations of deans, the advantages of the
Mid-Victorian novel ... But your discursive essayist is a nuisance.
Best come to the point. The bore is in finding a point to come to.
Besides, the chances are that any such point will have long ago been
worn blunt by a score of more active seekers. Alas!

Since I wrote the foregoing words, I have been out for a long walk,
in search of inspiration, through the streets of what is called the
West End. Snobbishly so called. Why draw these crude distinctions? We
all know that Mayfair happens to lie a few miles further west than
Whitechapel. It argues a lack of breeding to go on calling attention
to the fact. If the people of Whitechapel were less beautiful or less
well-mannered or more ignorant than we, there might be some excuse.
But they are not so. True, themselves talk about the East End, but
this only makes the matter worse. To a sensitive ear their phrase
has a ring of ironic humility that jars not less than our own coarse
boastfulness. Heaven knows they have a right to be ironic, and who
shall blame them for exercising it? All the same, this sort of thing
worries me horribly.

I said that I found Christmas rather agreeable than otherwise. But I
was speaking as one accustomed to live mostly in the past. The walk I
have just taken, refreshing in itself, has painfully reminded me that
I cannot hit it off with the present. My life is in the later days of
the eighteenth and the earlier days of the nineteenth century. This
twentieth affair is as a vision, dimly foreseen at odd moments, and
put from me with a slight shudder. My actual Christmases are spent
(say) in Holland House, which has but recently b