urse and in contact with the shallowest
heads in the community.

But in case your learned professors have not contributed all their hidden
lore and scholarship to the cheap Encyclopaedias, and still allow their
learning to leak out at lectures, you may have come expecting instruction
from me on some neglected subject. If that is so, I must confess myself
at once an impostor. I have no information to give you. I assume your
erudition to compensate for my own lack of it. There are no facts which
I might bring before you that you cannot find stated more clearly in
valuable manuals or works of reference, if you have not mastered them
already. There is no scientific or philosophic theory which I might
propound that you could not hear with greater benefit from others.

Briefly, I have no orange up my sleeve.

Let there be no deception or disappointment. I want you to play with an
idea as children play at ball--not football--but the old game of catch.
And out of this discussion, for I trust that you will all differ, if not
with me, at least with each other, trains of thought may be quickened;
mental grassland ploughed up; hidden perspectives unveiled. Above all, I
would stimulate you to an appreciation of your contemporaries and of
contemporary literature, contemporary drama, and contemporary art.

Every few years distinguished men lift their voices, and tell us that all
is over, _decay has begun_. The obscure and the anonymous echo the
sentiment in the London Press. With the fall of any Government its
supporters prophesy the rapid decomposition of the Empire; in the pulpit
eloquent preachers of every sect and communion, thundering against the
vices of Society, declare that Society is breaking up. Of course, not
being in Society, I am hardly in a position to judge; and the vices I
know only at second-hand--from the preachers. Yet I see no outward signs
of decay in Society; it dresses quite as well, in some ways better than,
it did. Society eats as much, judging from the size and number of new
restaurants; its patronises as usual the silliest plays in London, and
buys in larger quantities than ever the idiotic novels provided for it.
Have you ever been to a bazaar in aid of Our Dumb Friends' League? Well,
you see Society _there_, I can tell you; it is not dumb. And the
conversation sounds no less vapid and no less brilliant than we are told
it was in the eighteenth century; the dresses and faces are quite as
pr