me most of the author's
names are lost; that, of the few that survive, a number have
found their way into wrong places; that Ruskin for example is
credited with "Sartor Resartus," that "Laus Veneris" and
"Dolores" are ascribed to Queen Elizabeth, "The Anatomy of
Melancholy" to Charles II; and that, as for the titles, these
were never invented by the authors, but by a Committee?

Will you still go on to imagine that all the poetry is printed as
prose; while all the long paragraphs of prose are broken up into
short verses, so that they resemble the little passages set out
for parsing or analysis in an examination paper?

This device, as you know, was first invented by the exiled
translators who published the Geneva Bible (as it is called) in
1557; and for pulpit use, for handiness of reference, for 'waling
a portion,' it has its obvious advantages: but it is, after all
and at the best, a very primitive device: and, for my part, I
consider it the deadliest invention of all for robbing the book
of outward resemblance to literature and converting it to the
aspect of a gazetteer--a _biblion a-biblion,_ as Charles Lamb
puts it.

Have we done? By no means. Having effected all this, let us
pepper the result over with italics and numerals, print it in
double columns, with a marginal gutter on either side, each
gutter pouring down an inky flow of references and cross
references. Then, and not till then, is the outward disguise
complete--so far as you are concerned. It remains only then to
appoint it to be read in Churches, and oblige the child to get
selected portions of it by heart on Sundays. But you are yet to
imagine that the authors themselves have taken a hand in the
game: that the later ones suppose all the earlier ones to have
been predicting all the time in a nebulous fashion what they
themselves have to tell, and indeed to have written mainly with
that object: so that Macaulay and Adam Smith, for example,
constantly interrupt the thread of their discourse to affirm that
what they tell us must be right because Walter Map or the author
of "Piers Plowman" foretold it ages before.

Now a grown man--that is to say, a comparatively unimpressionable
man--that is again to say, a man past the age when to enjoy the
Bible is priceless--has probably found out somehow that the word
prophet does not (in spite of vulgar usage) mean 'a man who
predicts.' He has experienced too many prophets of that kind--
especially since 1914--