eralism coming home to roost, just as
you are settling down to the old order....

"Six o'clock, by Jove! We shall keep them waiting if we don't mind."

THE USE OF IDEALS

"Ideals!" said my uncle; "certainly Ideals. Of course one must have
ideals, else life would be bare materialism. Bare fact alone, naked
necessity, is impossible barren rock for a soul to root upon. Life,
indeed, is an unfurnished house, an empty glass in a thirsty land--good
and necessary for foundation, but insufficient for any satisfaction
unless we have ideals. Or, again, ideals are the flesh upon the
skeleton of reality, and it cannot live without them.

"It always appears to me," said my uncle, "that the comparison of
ideals to furniture is particularly appropriate. They are the
draperies of the mind, and they hide the nakedness of truth. Your
fireplace is ugly, your mere necessary shelves and seats but planks and
crudity, all your surroundings so much office furniture, until the
skilful hand and the draperies come in. Then a few cunning loopings
and foldings, and behold softness and delicacy, crudity gone, and life
well worth the living. So that you cannot value ideals too highly.

"Yet at the same time----" My uncle became meditative.

"I would not have a man the _slave_ of his ideals. Hangings make the
room comfortable, but, after all, hangings _are_ hangings. Perhaps,
now and then--of course, I would not suggest continual inconstancy--a
slight change, a little rearrangement, even a partial replacement,
might brighten up the dear old dwelling-place. An ideal may be clung
to too fondly. When the moth gets into it, or the dust--did not
Carlyle warn us against this, lest they 'accumulate and at last produce
suffocation'? I am exactly at one with him there.

"And that, as any Cabinet Minister explains every time he opens a
public library, is why we have literature. Good books are the
warehouses of ideals. Does it strike you your furniture is sombre, a
bit Calvinistic and severe--try a statuette by Pope, or a classical
piece out of Heine. Too much white and gold for every-day
purposes--then the Reverend Laurence Sterne will oblige. Urban tone
may be corrected by Hardy, and Lowell will give you urbanity. And,
however well you match and balance them, remember there is a time for
ideals, and a time when they are better out of the way.

"The Philistine of Victorian literature, is a person without ideals,
the practical