ng and disreputable. We are at heart commercial
Puritans all the time; we loathe experiments and originality and
independence; we think that God rewards respectability, because we
believe that material rewards--wealth, comfort, position--are the only
things worth having. We call ourselves Christians, and we crucify the
Christ-like spirit of simplicity and liberty. But let us at least make
up our minds as to what we desire, and not try to arrive at a
disgusting compromise. Our way is to persecute genius living and to
crown it dead. Can we not make a sincere attempt to recognise it when
it is among us, to look out for it, to encourage it, instead of acting
in the spirit of Pickwickian caution, and when there are two mobs, to
shout with the largest?

LI

I have been reading the Memoir of J.H. Shorthouse, and it has been a
great mystery to me. It is an essentially commonplace kind of life that
is there revealed. He was a well-to-do manufacturer--of vitriol, too,
of all the incongruous things. He belonged to a cultivated suburban
circle, that soil where the dullest literary flowers grow and flourish.
He lived in a villa with small grounds; he went off to his business in
the morning, and returned in the afternoon to a high tea. In the
evening he wrote and read aloud. The only thing that made him different
from other men was that he had the fear of epileptic attacks for ever
hanging over him; and further, he was unfitted for society owing to a
very painful and violent stammer. I saw him twice in my life; remote
impressions of people seen for a single evening are often highly
inaccurate, but I will give them for what they are worth. On the first
occasion I saw a small, sturdily built man, with a big, clerical sort
of face with marked features, and, as far as I can recollect, rather
coppery in hue. There was a certain grotesqueness communicated to the
face by large, thin, fly-away whiskers of the kind that used to be
known as "weepers" or "Dundrearies." He had then just dawned upon the
world as a celebrity. I had myself as an under-graduate read and
re-read and revelled in _John Inglesant_, and I was intensely curious
to see him and worship him. But he was not a very worshipful man. He
gave the impression of great courtesy and simplicity; but his stammer
was an obstacle to any sense of ease in his presence. I seem to
recollect that instead of being brought up, as most stammerers are, by
a consonant, it took the form wi