the pictures. We are very
intimate friends and play-fellows." Yes: decidedly Steele's children
must have loved their clever, faulty, kindly father.

[Footnote 54: A few sentences in this paper are borrowed from the
writer's "Life of Steele," 1886.]

_Austin Dobson._

A DEFENCE OF NONSENSE

There are two equal and eternal ways of looking at this twilight world
of ours: we may see it as the twilight of evening or the twilight of
morning; we may think of anything, down to a fallen acorn, as a
descendant or as an ancestor. There are times when we are almost
crushed, not so much with the load of the evil as with the load of the
goodness of humanity, when we feel that we are nothing but the
inheritors of a humiliating splendour. But there are other times when
everything seems primitive, when the ancient stars are only sparks
blown from a boy's bonfire, when the whole earth seems so young and
experimental that even the white hair of the aged, in the fine
biblical phrase, is like almond-trees that blossom, like the white
hawthorn grown in May. That it is good for a man to realize that he is
"the heir of all the ages" is pretty commonly admitted; it is a less
popular but equally important point that it is good for him sometimes
to realize that he is not only an ancestor, but an ancestor of primal
antiquity; it is good for him to wonder whether he is not a hero, and
to experience ennobling doubts as to whether he is not a solar myth.

The matters which most thoroughly evoke this sense of the abiding
childhood of the world are those which are really fresh, abrupt and
inventive in any age; and if we were asked what was the best proof of
this adventurous youth in the nineteenth century we should say, with
all respect to its portentous sciences and philosophies, that it was
to be found in the rhymes of Mr. Edward Lear and in the literature of
nonsense. "The Dong with the Luminous Nose," at least, is original, as
the first ship and the first plough were original.

It is true in a certain sense that some of the greatest writers the
world has seen--Aristophanes, Rabelais and Sterne--have written
nonsense; but unless we are mistaken, it is in a widely different
sense. The nonsense of these men was satiric--that is to say,
symbolic; it was a kind of exuberant capering round a discovered
truth. There is all the difference in the world between the instinct
of satire, which, seeing in the Kaiser's moustaches something typi