ation to be solemn. There is an old story
about Scott and Wordsworth, when the latter stayed at Abbotsford;
Scott, during the whole visit, was full of little pleasant and
courteous allusions to Wordsworth's poems; and one of the guests
present records how at the end of the visit not a single word had ever
passed Wordsworth's lips which could have indicated that he knew his
host to have ever written a line of poetry or prose.

I was sitting the other day at a function next a man of some eminence,
and I was really amazed at the way in which he discoursed of himself
and his habits, his diet, his hours of work, and the blank indifference
with which he received similar confidences. He merely waited till the
speaker had finished, and then resumed his own story.

It is this sort of solemn egotism which makes us overvalue our
anxieties quite out of all proportion to their importance, because they
all appear to us as integral elements of a dignified drama in which we
enact the hero's part. We press far too heavily on the sense of
responsibility; and if we begin by telling boys, as is too often done
in sermons, that whatever they do or say is of far-reaching
consequence, that every lightest word may produce an effect, that any
carelessness of speech or example may have disastrous effects upon the
character of another, we are doing our best to encourage the
self-emphasis which is the very essence of priggishness.

There is a curious conflict going on at the present time in English
life between light-mindedness and solemnity; there is a great appetite
for living, a love of amusement, a tendency to subordinate the
interests of the future to the pleasure of the moment, and to think
that the one serious evil is boredom; that is a healthy manifestation
enough in its way, because it stands for interest and delight in life;
but there is another strain in our nature, that of a rather heavy
pietism, inherited from our Puritan ancestors. It must not be forgotten
that the Puritan got a good deal of interest out of his sense of sin;
as the old combative elements of feudal ages disappeared, the soldierly
blood retained the fighting instinct, and turned it into moral regions.
The sense of adventure is impelled to satiate itself, and the Pilgrim's
Progress is a clear enough proof that the old combativeness was all
there, revelling in danger, and exulting in the thought that the human
being was in the midst of foes. Sin represented itself to th