ereby deepening the delusion of the other prisoners whom his
genius has played the crimp to, enticing them into the den and hocussing
and chaining them there. For, seeing the shadows pass to the
interpretation of such a voice, they are satisfied that they indeed behold
Things as They Are, and that these are the only things worth knowing.

"The tragedy of it lies in this, that Mr. Kipling in his greater moments
cannot help but see that he, with every inspired singer, is by right the
prophet of a law and order compared with which all the majestic law and
order of the British Empire are but rags and trumpery:--"

"'I ha' harpit ye up to the throne o' God,
I ha' harpit your midmost soul in three;
I ha' harpit ye down to the Hinges o' Hell,
And--ye--would--make--a Knight o' me!'"

"Not long ago an interviewer called on Mr. Meredith, and brought away this
for his pains:--

"'I suppose I should regard myself as getting old--I am
seventy-four. But I do not feel to be growing old either in
heart or mind. I still look on life with a young man's eye.
I have always hoped I should not grow old as some do--with a
palsied intellect, living backwards, regarding other people as
anachronisms because they themselves have lived on into other
times, and left their sympathies behind them with their years.'

"He never will. He will always preserve the strength of manhood in his
work because hope, the salt of manhood, is the savour of all his
philosophy. When I think of his work as a whole--his novels and poems
together--this confession of his appears to me, not indeed to summarise
it--for it is far too multifarious and complex--but to say the first and
the last word upon it. In poem and in novel he puts a solemnity of his
own into the warning, _ne tu pueri contempseris annos_. He has never
grown old, because his hopes are set on the young; and his dearest wish,
for those who can read beneath his printed word, is to leave the world not
worse, but so much the better as a man may, for the generations to come
after him. To him this is 'the cry of the conscience of life':--"

"'Keep the young generations in hail,
And bequeath them no tumbled house.'

"To him this is at once a duty and a 'sustainment supreme,' and perhaps
the bitterest words this master of Comedy has written are for the seniors
of the race who--

"'On their last plank,
Pas