Various

“ You remember his formula to young Copperfield: "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six; result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six; result misery."
Lloyd George, keeping this axiom steadily in view, after dallying with income and expenditure counted by the hundred million, came out triumphant with £252,000 in his pocket. ”

“ From whom the hands of David itch
To pluck their plumage, quick or dead;
For then, a super-man, I'd scorn to grudge it—
This super-tax on my estate,
But like a bird contribute to his Budget
The paltry two-and-eight. ”

“ When there is a good deal of talk on the stage about a certain character, who however remains "off" throughout the play and gives you no chance to discover for yourself what he is like, then I have an instinctive distrust of him. If his name is as bad as Cecil he is practically doomed. Betty Dunbar, widow, ran away from her rich sister's house and spent a night in London with such a Cecil. ”

“ Fitting after fitting leaves it even worse than before; and the result is that one either loses one's temper and bangs out of the place and never enters it again, or, not wishing to hurt the tailor's feelings, one accepts defeat and gives the coat away the next day at considerable personal loss. In other words, a time comes when one either cannot, through disgust, bring oneself to visit one's tailor again on that matter, or when one cannot, through sympathy, bring oneself to ask him to do any more. ”

“ So that's the end of Johnny, my boy prodigy, for whom I have suffered so long. It is not Johnny but Jno. who struggles with the National Anthem. He will give up music now, for he knows I have the bulge on him; I can flood his bathroom whenever I like. Probably he will learn something quieter—like painting. ”

“ But the world is also older now, and perhaps the oldest person in it is the woman suffragist—such a one, for instance, as Betty's elder sister, Ethel, who carried copies of Votes for Women about with her when she strolled through the home park. That Ethel should share Dr. Primrose's ingenuous views on this matter is unbelievable—by me, but not by the author. For she insisted, under threat of cutting off supplies, that Betty should marry Cecil, and (so to speak) become a lady again. ”

“ Beresford's work lies. In his desire to avoid any possible cheapness or weak indulgence he misses, perhaps, some effects of colour and pathos that might, a little, have heightened the contrasts of his study; and I do not feel that the woman is as vivid as she should be. These things, however, affect very slightly a story that its author may indeed be proud to have written.
Penelope was the heroine. She was in what are called reduced circumstances, and was moreover encumbered by sisters who were not quite all that could have been wished in the way of niceness. ”

“ On the same mornings little Johnny enters his music-room (underneath) and gives himself up to musical composition. Thus we are at work together.
The worst of literary composition is this: that when you have got hold of what you feel is a really powerful idea you find suddenly that you have been forestalled by some earlier writer—Sophocles or Shakspeare or George R. Sims. Then you have to think again. This frequently happens to me upstairs; and downstairs poor Johnny will find to his horror one day that his great work has already been given to the world by another—a certain Dr. ”

“ All men have tailors, and for the most part they stick to them, because they find them all right, or fear to go further afield to begin all over again. But every now and then it happens, no matter how good the tailor, that a coat is stubborn. ”

“ There is humour in the book and some good description in patches, but towards understanding the Irish priest it will probably assist Sir Edward Carson and Mr. John Redmond very little more than it will assist a settlement of the problems of Ulster. However, it may give them an agreeable hour or so in a railway train, and the announcement (also made on the cover) that it is "an entirely new novel, now published for the first time," may call their attention to the value, in art as well as politics, of emphatic tautology. ”

“ When a young widow wants to commit a flagrant outrage on the proprieties in order to scandalise a detested mother-in-law, and selects the first likely man for her accomplice, she will probably not be deterred by fear of any damage that may occur to his reputation. ”

“ The characters have never anything but a very distant resemblance to life; and their speech is for the most part that of a lady novelist's [pg 380] creations rather than of human beings. But those who demand "a good tale," with beauty properly distressed till the last page, and there beatified with the knowledge that "the darkness that surrounded her was scattered for ever," will find some highly agreeable pasturage in A Garden of the Gods. ”

“ Beresford has presented his atmosphere—the rooms, the dirty strip of garden, the shabby suburb, the London rain—but beyond all these things is the central figure of Gregg himself. Here is a character entirely new to English fiction—a man who in spite of his degradation has his brilliance, his humour and, above all, his mystery. It is in this implication that, at the very heart of the man, there are fine things too degraded and degraded things too fine for any human record of them to be possible that the exceptional merit of Mr. ”

“ There is certainly a lack of lovable women in the book, yet I have always been led to suppose that the U.S.A., the locus in quo, overflows with feminine charm, and our author is obviously man enough to appreciate and reproduce it for us. ”

“ However, even a critic must take things as they are, and it is a collection of short stories that I have to complain about. My complaint, then, reduces itself to this, that in the case of each of them I regret their shortness.
Jovial Person (to sweep) . "Hullo, Chawlie me boy. Glad ter see yer lookin' so well."
Mr. Lloyd George (to shade of Pitt) . "Peace hath her income-tax no less renowned than War." ”

“ Betty wisely refused, which left the way clear for Sir Egbert Englefield, and [pg 376] so brought down the curtain. I haven't mentioned Sir Egbert before, but he was there or thereabouts all the time, and being in the flesh Mr. H. V. Esmond, author of the play, it was obvious that he would have the pull over any unseen Cecil in the final arrangement of partners.
Although Ethel appears to be impossible, and the other characters mostly conventional, The Dangerous Age makes a very charming entertainment at the Vaudeville, a patchwork of humour and pathos ingeniously woven together ”

“ I said; "I make it stricter than ever. If you hadn't used my table I should have looked in my coat pocket and found the letter long ago."
"Anyhow," she said, "it's a comfort to think you won't have to write to the Sultan of Morocco."
R. C. L.
THE LORD OF THE LEVIATHANS.
There harbours somewhere in our midst to-day
A visionary whom I long to meet;
He shuns publicity, and yet his sway
Is felt in many a teeming London street,
From staid Stoke Newington to sylvan Sheen,
From gay Mile End to high-browed Golder's Green. ”

“ Roosevelt originally thought of calling it the Taft, but finally decided on the Rio Encyclopædia in virtue of its volume.
The journey was made in canoes and was full of incident. Descending the great Golliwog Falls Mr. Roosevelt's canoe was smashed to atoms, but the ex-President escaped with only slight injury to his eyeglasses, after a desperate conflict with a pliocene crocodile. The Encyclopædia River, as described by Mr. Roosevelt, resembles the Volga, the Hoang-ho and the Mississippi; but it is richer in snags and of a deeper and more luscious purple than any of them. ”

“ I can't think why more people don't do it—I mean travel when they can't afford it. Perhaps it is that all bankers aren't so good-natured as you are. I shall tell all my friends to come to you in future. ”

“ Thornton, the new manager of the Great Eastern Railway, will deliver addresses. A demonstration in Hyde Park in honour of our guest is also being organised by his English publishers, Messrs. Dodder and Dodder, at which their principal authors will speak at thirteen different platforms, and a resolution will be simultaneously moved by blast of trumpet that Professor Stormbarner is the greatest novelist in the world. ”

“ Enoch's Parish Church, it would be possible to have marriage celebrated at two o'clock on any particular week-day. That meant that in ordinary circumstances it would be possible to have marriage celebrated in St. Enoch's Church at two o'clock on any week day."—Glasgow Evening Times.
Left to ourselves, we were just arriving at the same conclusion.
"Captain W. M. Turner joined Freeman, and played the best cricket of the day. He bit hard on the off-side."—Daily Telegraph.
We always move to the leg side of the field when Captain Turner comes in. ”

“ Redmond, and in a short preface he says: "The Irish Roman Catholic priest is the main factor in present-day Irish affairs. I have attempted to catch him at his best in the butterfly net of this trivial story...." I am anxious not to do Mr. Stacpoole an injustice, but I do feel that (as an entomologist) he gets easily tired. In the 250 pages of Father O'Flynn there is a good deal of very tolerable Irish "atmosphere"; a very tepid love affair between Miss Eileen Pope and a gentleman from England "over for the hunting;" ”

“ The disasters that overwhelm him in the end do not leave his readers unmoved; bankrupt and beaten he goes down fighting with the final characteristic wire, in response to a suggestion of compromise by his chief enemy, "Surrender be damned." ”

“ The village priest of Clogher, as depicted in two colours on the paper wrapper of Father O'Flynn (Hutchinson) , is a man of plethoric habit and sanguine countenance engaged in brandishing a large horsewhip. ”

“ Petersburg, are required by the conditions not only to produce a statue which will be recognized by the man in the street as that of the monarch, but it must also convey the idea that he spent his last days in the Palace. ”

“ Please hold yourself in readiness to co-ordinate the action of your troops with that of the Royal Irish Constabulary.—Your obedient Servant, Nevil Macready, Resident Magistrate. To Sir Nevil Macready, General in command of troops in Ireland."
Premier tried to explain away the situation. Remembering recreation of Mr. Toots, it is not really so bad as Lord "Bob's" earnest desire for preservation of law and order in Ulster leads him to fear. ”

“ Farmer's Wife (to visitor) . "Now, Johnny, will you go and collect the eggs, and don't take the china ones. I suppose you know what they're for?"
Johnny. "Oh, yes; they're for a pattern to show 'em how to make the others."
OUR BOOKING-OFFICE. (By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.}
Mr. Beresford is most warmly to be congratulated upon his new book, The House in Demetrius Road (Heinemann) . Mr. Beresford's work has had from the first remarkable qualities that place him beyond question amongst the first half-dozen of the younger English novelists ”