he first moment that matters.

As to how long an interval the hero should let elapse between the young
man's arrival and his own entry, I cannot offer any very exact advice.
I should say, roughly, that in ten minutes the young man would be strung
up to the right pitch, and that more than twenty minutes would be too
much. It is important that expectancy shall have worked on him to the
full, but it is still more important that his mood shall not have been
chafed to impatience. The danger of over-long delay is well exemplified
in the sad case of young Coventry Patmore. In his old age Patmore
wrote to Mr. Gosse a description of a visit he had paid, at the age of
eighteen, to Leigh Hunt; and you will find the letter on page 32, vol.
I, of Mr. Basil Champneys' biography of him. The circumstances had been
most propitious. The eager and sensitive spirit of the young man, his
intense admiration for 'The Story of Rimini,' the letter of introduction
from his father to the venerable poet and friend of greater bygone
poets, the long walk to Hammersmith, the small house in a square
there--all was classically in order. The poet was at home. The visitor
as shown in.... 'I had,' he was destined to tell Mr. Gosse, 'waited in
the little parlour at least two hours, when the door was opened and a
most picturesque gentleman, with hair flowing nearly or quite to his
shoulders, a beautiful velvet coat and a Vandyck collar of lace about
a foot deep, appeared, rubbing his hands and smiling ethereally, and
saying, without a word of preface or notice of my having waited so long,
"This is a beautiful world, Mr. Patmore!"' The young man was so taken
aback by these words that they 'eclipsed all memory of what occurred
during the remainder of the visit.'

Yet there was nothing wrong about the words themselves. Indeed, to any
one with any sense of character and any knowledge of Leigh Hunt, they
must seem to have been exactly, exquisitely, inevitably the right words.
But they should have been said sooner.

SERVANTS 1918.

It is unseemly that a man should let any ancestors of his arise from
their graves to wait on his guests at table. The Chinese are a polite
race, and those of them who have visited England, and gone to dine in
great English houses, will not have made this remark aloud to their
hosts. I believe it is only their own ancestors that they worship, so
that they will not have felt themselves guilty of impiety in not rising
from the t