nder
and a treasure to last one's lifetime; but I confess that since a club
took him up and feasted his memory with field-marshals and other
irrelevant persons in the chair, and since his fame has become vulgarised
not only in Thames-side hotels, but over the length and breadth of the
North American continent, one at least of his admirers has suffered a not
unnatural revulsion, until now he can scarcely endure to read the immortal
quatrains. Immortal they are, no doubt, and deserve to be by reason of
their style--"fame's great antiseptic." But their philosophy is thin
after all, and will not bear discussion. As exercise for a grown man's
thought, I will back a lyric of Blake's or Wordsworth's, or a page of
Ibsen's _Peer Gynt_ against the whole of it, any day.

This, however, is parenthetical. I caught hold of FitzGerald's verses to
express that jollity which should be every man's who looks up from much
reading or writing and knows that Spring has come.

"_Solvitur acris hiems grata vice veris et favoni
Trahuntque siccas machinae carinas_ . . ."

In other words, I look out of the window and decide that the day has
arrived for launching the boat--

"This is that happy morn,
That day, long wished day!"

And, to my mind, the birthday of the year. Potentates and capitalists who
send down orders to Cowes or Southampton that their yachts are to be put
in commission, and anon arrive to find everything ready (if they care to
examine), from the steam capstan to the cook's apron, have little notion
of the amusement to be found in fitting out a small boat, say of five or
six tons. I sometimes doubt if it be not the very flower, or at least the
bloom, of the whole pastime. The serious face with which we set about it;
the solemn procession up the river to the creek where she rests, the high
tide all but lifting her; the silence in which we loose the moorings and
haul off; the first thrill of buoyant water underfoot; the business of
stepping the mast; quiet days of sitting or pottering about on deck in the
sunny harbour; vessels passing up and down, their crews eyeing us
critically as the rigging grows and the odds and ends--block, tackle and
purchase--fall into their ordered places; and through it all the
expectation running of the summer to come, and 'blue days at sea' and
unfamiliar anchorages--unfamiliar, but where the boat is, home will be--

"Such bliss
Beggars enjo