Yet even
Shakespeare, the critics tell us--and they say they know--posed in the
character of Hamlet.

After all, the pose novel method has at times attained to the level of
literature. Charlotte Bronte might possibly have found no other topic
had she disdained the plain little woman with a shrewish tongue; and
where had Charles Kingsley been if the vision of a curate rampant had
not rejoiced his heart? Still, I am not sorry that this novel is burned.
Even now it was ridiculous, and the time might have come when this book,
full of high, if foolish aims, and the vain vast promise of well-meaning
youth, had been too keen a reproach to be endured. Three volumes of good
intentions! It is too much. There was more than a novel burning just
now. After this I shall be in a position to take a humorist's view of
life.

THE VETERAN CRICKETER

My old cricketer was seized, he says, some score of years ago now, by
sciatica, clutched indeed about the loins thereby, and forcibly
withdrawn from the practice of the art; since when a certain
predisposition to a corpulent habit has lacked its natural check of
exercise, and a broadness almost Dutch has won upon him. Were it not for
this, which renders his contours and his receding aspect unseemly, he
would be indeed a venerable-looking person, having a profile worthy of a
patriarch, tinged though it may be with an unpatriarchal jollity, and a
close curly beard like that of King David. He lives by himself in a
small cottage outside the village--hating women with an unaccountable
detestation--and apparently earns a precarious livelihood, and certainly
the sincere aversion of the country side, by umpiring in matches, and
playing whist and "Nap" with such as will not be so discreet and
economical as to bow before his superior merit.

His neighbours do not like him, because he will not take their cricket
or their whist seriously, because he will persist in offering counsel
and the stimulus of his gift of satire. All whist than his he avers is
"Bumble-puppy." His umpiring is pedagogic in tone; he fails to see the
contest in the game. To him, who has heard his thousands roar as the
bails of the best of All England went spinning, these village matches
are mere puerile exercises to be corrected. His corrections, too, are
Olympian, done, as it were, in red ink, vivid, and without respect of
persons. Particularly he gibes. He never uses vulgar bad language
himself, but has a singular powe