ason, and so prepared the way for the
Dublin rebellion. Highly placed and highly paid flaccidity then
reigned supreme, and produced its inevitable result. But last December
we were assured that flaccidity had made way for firmness, and that
the pudding had been replaced by the flint. But the transactions
of the last few weeks--one transaction in particular[*]--seem worthy
of our flabbiest days.

[Footnote *: A release for political objects.]

I turn my eyes homewards again, from Dublin to the House of Commons.
The report of the Mesopotamia Commission has announced to the world
a series of actions which every Briton feels as a national disgrace.
Are the perpetrators of those actions to go unpunished? Are they
to retain their honours and emoluments, the confidence of their
Sovereign, and the approbation of his Ministers? If so, flaccidity
will stand revealed as what in truth it has always been--the one
quality which neutralizes all other gifts, and makes its possessor
incapable of governing.

V

_THE PROMISE OF MAY_

This is the real season for a holiday, if holidays were still possible.
It is a point of literary honour not to quote the line which shows
that our forefathers, in the days of Chaucer, felt the holiday-making
instinct of the spring, and that instinct has not been affected by
the lapse of the centuries. It stirs us even in London, when the
impetuous lilacs are bursting into bud, and the sooty sparrows
chirrup love-songs, and "a livelier iris changes on the burnished
dove"--or, to be more accurate, pigeon--which swells and straddles
as if Piccadilly were all his own. The very wallflowers and daffodils
which crown the costers' barrows help to weave the spell; and,
though pleasure-jaunts are out of the question, we welcome a call
of duty which takes us, even for twenty-four hours, into "the country
places, which God made and not man."

For my own part, I am no victim of the "pathetic fallacy" by which
people in all ages have persuaded themselves that Nature sympathized
with their joys and sorrows. Even if that dream had not been dispelled,
in prose by Walter Scott, and in verse by Matthew Arnold, one's
own experience, would have proved it false.

"Alas! what are we, that the laws of Nature should correspond in
their march with our ephemeral deeds or sufferings?" _The Heart
of Midlothian_.

"Man must begin, know this, where Nature ends;
Nature and man can never be fast friends."[*]

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