ce, the less said is the better."

Then he continues:

"But there was a spectacle to witness which might excuse much.
Those who, straight from the contested field, wandered sobbing
through the rooms of the ladies' house, saw what it were well could
the outraged earth have straightway hidden. The inner apartment was
ankle-deep in blood. The plaster was scored with sword-cuts; not
high up as where men have fought, but low down, and about the
corners, as if a creature had crouched to avoid the blow. Strips of
dresses, vainly tied around the handles of the doors, signified the
contrivance to which feminine despair had resorted as a means of
keeping out the murderers. Broken combs were there, and the frills
of children's trousers, and torn cuffs and pinafores, and little
round hats, and one or two shoes with burst latchets, and one or two
daguerreotype cases with cracked glasses. An officer picked up a
few curls, preserved in a bit of cardboard, and marked 'Ned's hair,
with love'; but around were strewn locks, some near a yard in
length, dissevered, not as a keepsake, by quite other scissors."

The battle of Waterloo was fought on the 18th of June, 1815. I do not
state this fact as a reminder to the reader, but as news to him. For a
forgotten fact is news when it comes again. Writers of books have the
fashion of whizzing by vast and renowned historical events with the
remark, "The details of this tremendous episode are too familiar to the
reader to need repeating here." They know that that is not true. It is
a low kind of flattery. They know that the reader has forgotten every
detail of it, and that nothing of the tremendous event is left in his
mind but a vague and formless luminous smudge. Aside from the desire to
flatter the reader, they have another reason for making the remark-two
reasons, indeed. They do not remember the details themselves, and do not
want the trouble of hunting them up and copying them out; also, they are
afraid that if they search them out and print them they will be scoffed
at by the book-reviewers for retelling those worn old things which are
familiar to everybody. They should not mind the reviewer's jeer; he
doesn't remember any of the worn old things until the book which he is
reviewing has retold them to him.

I have made the quoted remark myself, at one time and another, but I was
not doing it to fl