Swinburne, who, in a fit of temper, hurled two poached eggs at George Meredith for speaking disrespectfully of Victor Hugo. The incident is suppressed in Mr. Gosse's tactful life, but Mr. Porter had it direct from Meredith, whose bath-chair he frequently pulled at Dorking. Swinburne was, I regret to say, pagan in his views, but, unlike some pagans, he was incapable of adhering to the golden mean. Aristotle, I feel certain, would never have condescended to the use of such a missile, and it is beyond "imagination's widest stretch" to picture, say, the late Dr. Joseph Cook, of Boston, the present Lord Aberdeen, or the Rev. Dr. Donald McGuffin acting in such a wild and tempestuous manner.

IV.

Still we must admit the existence of high temper even in men of high souls, high aims and high achievements. Everyone may improve his temper. We cannot all emulate the patience of Job, but we can at least set before us the noble example of Professor Cawker, who redeemed the angular exuberance of his youth by the mellow and mollifying kindliness of his maturity. Even if Mr. Gladstone did break chairs, we should not lightly condemn him. You cannot make omelettes without breaking eggs. Besides, chairs cannot retaliate.

Marcus Mull.

 

A Cynical Headline.

"NEW BRITISH BLOW.—BIRTHDAY HONOURS LIST."—Daily Mirror.

We congratulate our contemporary on its terseness. The Times took nearly a column to say the same thing.

BALLADE OF INCIPIENT LUNACY.

Scene.—A Battalion "Orderly" Room in France during a period of "Rest." Runners arrive breathlessly from all directions bearing illegible chits, and tear off in the same directions with illegible answers or no answer at all. Motor-bicycles snort up to the door and arrogant despatch-riders enter with enormous envelopes containing leagues of correspondence, orders, minutes, circulars, maps, signals, lists, schedules, summaries and all sorts. The tables are stacked with papers; the floor is littered with papers; papers fly through the air. Two type-writers click with maddening insistence in one corner. A signaller buzzes tenaciously at the telephone, talking in a strange language apparently to himself, as he never seems to be connected with anyone else. A stream of miscellaneous persons—quarter-masters, chaplains, generals, batmen, D.A.D.O.S.'s, sergeant-majors, staff-officers, buglers, Maires, officers just arriving, officers just going away, gas experts, bombing experts, interpreters, doctors—drifts in, wastes time, and drifts out again.

Clerks scribble ceaselessly, rolls and nominal rolls, nominal lists and lists. By the time they have finished one list it is long out-of-date. Then they start the next. Everything happens at the same time; nobody has time to finish a sentence. Only a military mind, with a very limited descriptive vocabulary and a chronic habit of self-deception, would call the place orderly.

The Adjutant speaks, hoarsely; while he speaks he writes about something quite different. In the middle of each sentence his pipe goes out; at the end of each sentence he lights a match. He may or may not light his pipe; anyhow he speaks:—

THE MUD LARKS.

If there is one man in France whom I do not envy it is the G.H.Q. Weather Prophet. I can picture the unfortunate wizard sitting in his bureau, gazing into a crystal, Old Moore's Almanack in one hand, a piece of seaweed in the other, trying to guess what tricks the weather will be up to next.

For there is nothing this climate cannot do. As a quick-change artist it stands sanspareil (French) and nulli secundus (Latin).

And now it seems to have mislaid the Spring altogether. Summer has come at one stride. Yesterday the staff-cars smothered one with mud as they whirled past; to-day they choke one with dust. Yesterday the authorities were issuing precautions against frostbite; to-day they are issuing precautions against sunstroke. Nevertheless we are not complaining. It will take a lot of sunshine to kill us; we like it, and we don't mind saying so.

The B.E.F. has cast from it its mitts and jerkins and whale-oil, emerged from its subterranean burrows into the open, and in every wood a mushroom town of bivouacs has sprung up over-night. Here and there amateur gardeners have planted flower-beds before their tents; one of my corporals is nursing some radishes in an ammunition-box and talks crop prospects by the hour. My troop-sergeant found two palm-plants in the ruins of a chateau glass-house, and now has them standing sentry at his bivouac entrance. He sits between them after evening stables, smoking his pipe and fancying himself back in Zanzibar; he expects the coker-nuts along about August, he tells me.

Summer has come, and on every slope graze herds of winter-worn gun-horses and transport mules. The new grass has gone to the heads of the latter and they make continuous exhibitions of themselves, gambolling about like ungainly lambkins and roaring with unholy laughter. Summer has come, and my groom and countryman has started to whistle again, sure sign that Winter is over, for it is only during the Summer that he reconciles himself to the War. War, he admits, serves very well as a light gentlemanly diversion for the idle months, but with the first yellow leaf he grows restless and hints indirectly that both ourselves and the horses would be much better employed in the really serious business of showing the little foxes some sport back in our own green isle. "That Paddy," says he, slapping the bay with a hay wisp, "he wishes he was back in the county Kildare, he does so, the dear knows. Pegeen, too, if she would be hearin' the houn's shoutin' out on her from the kennels beyond in