stuff--what you
might call riff-raff. There's not a book here, Lawford, that hasn't
at least a glimmer of the real thing in it--just Life, seen through
a living eye, and felt. As for literature, and style, and all that
gallimaufry, don't fear for them if your author has the ghost of a hint
of genius in his making.'

'But surely,' said Lawford, trying for the twentieth time to pretend
to himself that these endless books carried the faintest savour of the
delight to him which they must, he rather forlornly supposed, shower
upon Herbert, 'surely genius is a very rare thing!'

'Rare! the world simply swarms with it. But before you can bottle it up
in a book it's got to be articulate. Just for a single instant imagine
yourself Falstaff, and if there weren't hundreds of Falstaffs in every
generation, to be examples of his ungodly life, he'd be as dead as a
doornail to-morrow--imagine yourself Falstaff, and being so,
sitting down to write "Henry IV," or "The Merry Wives." It's simply
preposterous. You wouldn't be such a fool as to waste the time. A mere
Elizabethan scribbler comes along with a gift of expression and an
observant eye, lifts the bloated old tippler clean out of life, and
swims down the ages as the greatest genius the world has ever seen.
Whereas, surely, though you mustn't let me bore you with all this
piffle, it's Falstaff is the genius, and W. S. merely a talented
reporter.

'Lear, Macbeth, Mercutio--they live on their own, as it were. The
newspapers are full of them, if we were only the Shakespeares to see it.
Have you ever been in a Police Court? Have you ever WATCHED tradesmen
behind their counters? My soul, the secrets walking in the streets! You
jostle them at every corner. There's a Polonius in every first-class
railway carriage, and as many Juliets as there are boarding-schools.
What the devil are you, my dear chap, but genius itself, with all the
world brand new upon your shoulders? And who'd have thought it of you
ten days ago?

'It's simply and solely because we're all, poor wretches, dumb--dumb as
butts of Malmsez; dumb as drummerless drums. Here am I, ass that I am,
trickling out this--this whey that no more expresses me than Tupper
does Sappho. But that's what I want to mean. How inexhaustibly rich
everything is, if you only stick to life. Here it is packed away behind
these rotting covers, just the real thing, no respectable stodge; no
mere parasitic stuff; not more than a dozen poets; score