e other day, the
carrying of the guy would be less gloomy; but he would hoot at a
suspicion that he might admire anything so much as to make a good-looking
doll in its praise. There is absolutely no image-making art in the
practice of our people, except only this art of rags and contumely. Or,
again, if the revenge taken upon a guy were that of anger for a certain
cause, the destruction would not be the work of so thin an annual malice
and of so heartless a rancour.

But the single motive is that popular irony which becomes daily--or so it
seems--more and more the holiday temper of the majority. Mockery is the
only animating impulse, and a loud incredulity is the only intelligence.
They make an image of some one in whom they do not believe, to deride it.
Say that the guy is the effigy of an agitator in the cause of something
to be desired; the street man and boy have then two motives of mocking:
they think the reform to be not worth doing, and they are willing to
suspect the reformer of some kind of hypocrisy. Perhaps the guy of this
occasion is most characteristic of all guys in London. The people,
having him or her to deride, do not even wait for the opportunity of
their annual procession. They anticipate time, and make an image when it
is not November, and sell it at the market of the kerb.

Hear, moreover, the songs which some nameless one makes for the citizens,
perhaps in thoughtful renunciation of the making of their laws. These,
too, seem to have for their inspiration the universal taunt. They are,
indeed, most in vogue when they have no meaning at all--this it is that
makes the _succes fou_ (and here Paris is of one mind with London) of
the street; but short of such a triumph, and when a meaning is
discernible, it is an irony.

Bank Holiday courtship (if the inappropriate word can be pardoned) seems
to be done, in real life, entirely by banter. And it is the strangest
thing to find that the banter of women by men is the most mocking in the
exchange. If the burlesque of the maid's tongue is provocative, that of
the man's is derisive. Somewhat of the order of things as they stood
before they were inverted seems to remain, nevertheless, as a memory;
nay, to give the inversion a kind of lagging interest. Irony is made
more complete by the remembrance, and by an implicit allusion to the
state of courtship in other classes, countries, or times. Such an
allusion no doubt gives all its peculiar twang to