affles and defeats one's sincerest efforts
to make them sparkle and enthuse. The best way to manage--in fact,
the only sensible way--is to disguise repetitiousness of fact under
variety of form: skin your fact each time and lay on a new cuticle
of words. It deceives the eye; you think it is a new fact; it
gives you the idea that the court is carrying on like everything;
this excites you, and you drain the whole column, with a good
appetite, and perhaps never notice that it's a barrel of soup made
out of a single bean. Clarence's way was good, it was simple,
it was dignified, it was direct and business-like; all I say is,
it was not the best way:

COURT CIRCULAR.

On Monday, the king rode in the park.
" Tuesday, " " "
" Wendesday " " "
" Thursday " " "
" Friday, " " "
" Saturday " " "
" Sunday, " " "

However, take the paper by and large, I was vastly pleased with it.
Little crudities of a mechanical sort were observable here and
there, but there were not enough of them to amount to anything,
and it was good enough Arkansas proof-reading, anyhow, and better
than was needed in Arthur's day and realm. As a rule, the grammar
was leaky and the construction more or less lame; but I did not
much mind these things. They are common defects of my own, and
one mustn't criticise other people on grounds where he can't stand
perpendicular himself.

I was hungry enough for literature to want to take down the whole
paper at this one meal, but I got only a few bites, and then had
to postpone, because the monks around me besieged me so with eager
questions: What is this curious thing? What is it for? Is it a
handkerchief?--saddle blanket?--part of a shirt? What is it made of?
How thin it is, and how dainty and frail; and how it rattles.
Will it wear, do you think, and won't the rain injure it? Is it
writing that appears on it, or is it only ornamentation? They
suspected it was writing, because those among them who knew how
to read Latin and had a smattering of Greek, recognized some of
the letters, but they could make nothing out of the result as a
whole. I put my information in the simplest form I could:

"It is a public journal; I will explain what that is, another time.
It is not cloth, it is made of paper; some time I will explain
what paper is. The lines on it are read