think that long rows of Oriental dancing-girls would sway hither and
thither in an ecstasy of lament? Did they look for the funeral games of
Patroclus? I fear they had no such splendid and pagan meaning. I fear
they were only using the words "quiet" and "modest" as words to fill up
a page--a mere piece of the automatic hypocrisy which does become too
common among those who have to write rapidly and often. The word
"modest" will soon become like the word "honourable," which is said to
be employed by the Japanese before any word that occurs in a polite
sentence, as "Put honourable umbrella in honourable umbrella-stand;" or
"condescend to clean honourable boots." We shall read in the future that
the modest King went out in his modest crown, clad from head to foot in
modest gold and attended with his ten thousand modest earls, their
swords modestly drawn. No! if we have to pay for splendour let us praise
it as splendour, not as simplicity. When next I meet a rich man I intend
to walk up to him in the street and address him with Oriental hyperbole.
He will probably run away.

SCIENCE AND RELIGION

In these days we are accused of attacking science because we want it to
be scientific. Surely there is not any undue disrespect to our doctor in
saying that he is our doctor, not our priest, or our wife, or ourself.
It is not the business of the doctor to say that we must go to a
watering-place; it is his affair to say that certain results of health
will follow if we do go to a watering-place. After that, obviously, it
is for us to judge. Physical science is like simple addition: it is
either infallible or it is false. To mix science up with philosophy is
only to produce a philosophy that has lost all its ideal value and a
science that has lost all its practical value. I want my private
physician to tell me whether this or that food will kill me. It is for
my private philosopher to tell me whether I ought to be killed. I
apologise for stating all these truisms. But the truth is, that I have
just been reading a thick pamphlet written by a mass of highly
intelligent men who seem never to have heard of any of these truisms in
their lives.

Those who detest the harmless writer of this column are generally
reduced (in their final ecstasy of anger) to calling him "brilliant;"
which has long ago in our journalism become a mere expression of
contempt. But I am afraid that even this disdainful phrase does me too
much honour. I am m