Indeed, I always feel tainted with savagery and enjoying a vicarious lust, when I smile at the oft-repeated tale of the poor tiger in Dore's picture that hadn't got a Christian.

On the other hand, it tickles me immensely to behold a plethoric commonplace Briton roar himself purple with impassioned platitude at a political meeting; but I perceive that all my neighbours take him with the utmost seriousness.

Again, your literary journalist professes to wriggle in his chair over the humour of Jane Austen; to me she is the dullest lady that ever faithfully photographed the trivial.

Years ago I happened to be crossing Putney Bridge, in a frock-coat and silk hat, when a passing member of the proletariat dug his elbows in his comrade's ribs and, quoting a music-hall tag of the period, shouted "He's got 'em on!" whereupon both burst into peals of robustious but inane laughter.

Now, if I had turned to them, and said, "He would be funnier if I hadn't," and paraphrased, however wittily, Carlyle's ironical picture of a nude court of St.James's, they would have punched my head under the confused idea that I was trying to bamboozle them.