or, rather, I am composing it. Yes;
this is the beginning of a chapter which I am about to put together with
your help and assistance."

"Make it a mild one!" entreated his father.

"I assure you, sir, that throughout I am understating the case. We have
already discussed the question of a monarch's relation to the political
and religious controversies of his day. Is he any more truly in contact
with the national life on its intellectual side? The only occasion on
which I meet at your Court any representatives of literature, or art, is
when popular authors and dramatists have come among a miscellaneous
gathering of pork butchers, politicians, stock-brokers, bankers, and
other prosperous tradesmen to receive at your hands the now somewhat
tarnished honor of knighthood. They come in a strange garb hired for the
occasion, and they go again. How much have we ever troubled ourselves
about the value and quality of their work, or as to why they were
selected? Are they the men, think you, who will be reckoned a hundred
years hence the artistic and literary giants of their day? I doubt if
anybody thinks so except themselves. Is it not rather because by winning
contemporary popularity they represent the trade values of their
profession, something that can be made to pay, and which, when it does
pay, invites public recognition and encouragement? We give small
pensions to the specially deserving, I know, to save them from the
extremes of poverty and ourselves from disgrace; but to those pensions
do we ever add a title? No; titles are the reward of prosperity."

"But, my dear Max," said the King, "how do you expect me to judge of
such things? I should only make mistakes."

"You have for your advisers," answered his son, "some twenty men drawn
from all departments of life; ought you not to be able to rely on them?
When you came to the throne one of our greatest literary men lay
bed-ridden, dying quietly of old age. He had received a State pension,
for he was poor; he was a giant whose work was done; and he had never in
all his life been to Court. Did it occur to you to go and pay this old
man reverence? Did it occur to any of your advisers to suggest that you
should? Yet in the past kings have done these things, and history has
remembered to praise them for doing it. No, sir, we are out of touch
with all the really great things that are going on around us in
literature and art; for whenever anything new is really great it
inevitab