they came and told her
so. She smiled through her tears, and said only, "Virtue is its own
reward."--"The Napoleon of Notting Hill."

In a world without humour, the only thing to do is to eat. And how
perfect an exception! How can these people strike dignified attitudes,
and pretend that things matter, when the total ludicrousness of life is
proved by the very method by which it is supported? A man strikes the
lyre, and says, "Life is real, life is earnest," and then goes into a
room and stuffs alien substances into a hole in his head.--"The Napoleon
of Notting Hill."

[Sidenote: _G.K. Chesterton_]

A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time
to preach his own heresy.--"George Bernard Shaw."

[Sidenote: _G.K. Chesterton_]

Only in our romantic country do you have the romantic thing called
weather--beautiful and changeable as a woman. The great English
landscape painters (neglected now, like everything that is English) have
this salient distinction, that the weather is not the atmosphere of
their pictures; it is the subject of their pictures. They paint
portraits of the weather. The weather sat to Constable; the weather
posed for Turner--and the deuce of a pose it was. In the English
painters the climate is the hero; in the case of Turner a swaggering and
fighting hero, melodramatic but magnificent. The tall and terrible
protagonist robed in rain, thunder, and sunlight fills the whole canvas
and the whole foreground. Rich colours actually look more luminous on a
grey day, because they are seen aganst a dark background, and seem to be
burning with a lustre of their own. Against a dim sky all flowers look
like fireworks. There is something strange about them at once vivid and
secret, like flowers traced in fire in the grim garden of a witch. A
bright blue sky is necessarily the high-light in the picture, and its
brightness kills all the bright blue flowers. But on a grey day the
larkspur looks like fallen heaven; the red daisies are really the lost
red eyes of day, and the sunflower is the vice-regent of the sun.
Lastly, there is this value about the colour that men call colourless:
that it suggests in some way the mixed and troubled average of
existence, especially in its quality of strife and expectation and
promise. Grey is a colour that always seems on the eve of changing to
some other colour; of brightening into blue, or blanching into white, or
breaking into green or gold. So we