buses around him; but his spasmodic efforts
to expose these brought him into contact with realities so agonising
to his highstrung literary nerves that he invariably sank back into
debauches of unsocial optimism. Even the Swan of Avon had his glimpses
of the havoc of displacement wrought by Elizabethan romanticism in the
social machine which had been working with tolerable smoothness under
the prosaic guidance of Henry 8. The time was out of joint; and the
Swan, recognising that he was the last person to ever set it right,
consoled himself by offering the world a soothing doctrine of despair.
Not for me, thank you, that Swansdown pillow. I refuse as flatly
to fuddle myself in the shop of "W. Shakespeare, Druggist," as
to stimulate myself with the juicy joints of "C. Dickens, Family
Butcher." Of these and suchlike pernicious establishments my patronage
consists in weaving round the shop-door a barbed-wire entanglement of
dialectic and then training my moral machine-guns on the customers.

In this devilish function I have, as you know, acquired by practice
a tremendous technical skill; and but for the more or less innocent
pride I take in showing off my accomplishment to all and sundry, I
doubt whether even my iron nerves would be proof against the horrors
that have impelled me to thus perfect myself. In my nonage I believed
humanity could be reformed if only it were intelligently preached
at for a sufficiently long period. This first fine careless rapture
I could no more recapture, at my age, than I could recapture
hoopingcough or nettlerash. One by one, I have flung all political
nostra overboard, till there remain only dynamite and scientific
breeding. My touching faith in these saves me from pessimism: I
believe in the future; but this only makes the present--which I
foresee as going strong for a couple of million of years or so--all
the more excruciating by contrast.

For casting into dramatic form a compendium of my indictments of the
present from a purely political standpoint, the old play of Snt George
occurred to me as having exactly the framework I needed. In the person
of the Turkish Knight I could embody that howling chaos which does
duty among us for a body-politic. The English Knight would accordingly
be the Liberal Party, whose efforts (whenever it is in favor with the
electorate) to reduce chaos to order by emulating in foreign politics
the blackguardism of a Metternich or Bismarck, and in home politics