a mint of money,
for I believe I have a talent for it. Look at this--

There. That seems to me worth a good deal more money than all the
modern 'delineation of character', and 'folk' nonsense ever written.
What verve! What terseness! And yet how clear!

LECTOR. Let us be getting on.

AUCTOR. By all means, and let us consider more enduring things.

After a few miles the road going upwards, I passed through another gap
in the hills and--

LECTOR. Pardon me, but I am still ruminating upon that little tragedy
of yours. Why was the guardian a duchess?

AUCTOR. Well, it was a short play and modern, was it not?

LECTOR. Yes. And therefore, of course, you must have a title in it. I
know that. I do not object to it. What I want to know is, why a
duchess?

AUCTOR. On account of the reduction of scale: the concentration of the
thing. You see in the full play there would have been a lord, two
baronets, and say three ladies, and I could have put suitable words
into their mouths. As it was I had to make absolutely sure of the
element of nobility without any help, and, as it were, in one
startling moment. Do you follow? Is it not art?

I cannot conceive why a pilgrimage, an adventure so naturally full of
great, wonderful, far-off and holy things should breed such fantastic
nonsense as all this; but remember at least the little acolyte of
Rheims, whose father, in 1512, seeing him apt for religion, put him
into a cassock and designed him for the Church, whereupon the
youngling began to be as careless and devilish as Mercury, putting
beeswax on the misericords, burning feathers in the censer, and even
going round himself with the plate without leave and scolding the rich
in loud whispers when they did not put in enough. So one way with
another they sent him home to his father; the archbishop thrusting him
out of the south porch with his own hands and giving him the Common or
Ferial Malediction, which is much the same as that used by carters to
stray dogs.

When his father saw him he fumed terribly, cursing like a pagan, and
asking whether his son were a roysterer fit for the gallows as well as
a fool fit for a cassock. On hearing which complaint the son very
humbly and contritely said--

'It is not my fault but the contact with the things of the Church that
makes me gambol and frisk, just as the Devil they say is a good enough
fellow left to himself and is only moderately heated, yet when you put
him into holy water all