giving names to their joys in the wilderness.
One could not better sum up Christianity than by calling a small white
insignificant flower "The Star of Bethlehem." But then, again, one could
not better sum up the philosophy deduced from Darwinism than in the one
verbal picture of "having your monkey up."

Who first invented these violent felicities of language? Who first spoke
of a man "being off his head"? The obvious comment on a lunatic is that
his head is off him; yet the other phrase is far more fantastically
exact. There is about every madman a singular sensation that his body
has walked off and left the important part of him behind.

But the cases of this popular perfection in phrase are even stronger
when they are more vulgar. What concentrated irony and imagination there
is for instance, in the metaphor which describes a man doing a midnight
flitting as "shooting the moon"? It expresses everything about the run
away: his eccentric occupation, his improbable explanations, his furtive
air as of a hunter, his constant glances at the blank clock in the sky.

No; the English democracy is weak enough about a number of things; for
instance, it is weak in politics. But there is no doubt that democracy
is wonderfully strong in literature. Very few books that the cultured
class has produced of late have been such good literature as the
expression "painting the town red."

Oddly enough, this last Cockney epigram clings to my memory. For as I
was walking a little while ago round a corner near Victoria I realized
for the first time that a familiar lamp-post was painted all over with
a bright vermilion just as if it were trying (in spite of the obvious
bodily disqualification) to pretend that it was a pillar-box. I have
since heard official explanations of these startling and scarlet
objects. But my first fancy was that some dissipated gentleman on his
way home at four o'clock in the morning had attempted to paint the town
red and got only as far as one lamp-post.

I began to make a fairy tale about the man; and, indeed, this phrase
contains both a fairy tale and a philosophy; it really states almost the
whole truth about those pure outbreaks of pagan enjoyment to which all
healthy men have often been tempted. It expresses the desire to have
levity on a large scale which is the essence of such a mood. The rowdy
young man is not content to paint his tutor's door green: he would like
to paint the whole city scarlet. The wor