Various

“ It was the duty of a hat to afford not only covering for the head but shelter for the eyes, and no topper did this. A hat should have a flexible brim, which neither topper nor bowler possessed. It was absurd to wear a hat which could not sustain damage without showing it. Let there be a revival in the silk-hat industry by all means, but there must be no [pg 487] imposition of any one kind of hat on the public. The individual must be allowed perfect freedom to wear what he liked. ”

“ Who ever heard of a happy poet? Poetry and prosperity are incompatible. Instead of trying to make your protégé joyful you should have heaped sorrow upon him. It is well known that sorrow ennobles a man and enlarges his emotional experience. 'Poets learn in suffering what they teach in song' sang one of them who knew.
"However it is not too late. When next he seeks your Presence, indicate to him with that tact which is the birthright of princes that he no longer enjoys your favour. At the same time stop his pension and allow him to taste once more the life from which your bounty removed him. ”

“ The appeal of Hamlet is to the intelligence; that of L'Aiglon, so obviously pathetic in his own eyes, is rather to the heart. Indeed the intelligence of the audience is here often in trouble; for a certain acquaintance with history is required and both actors and stage-management offer little aid to the average ignorance. ”

“ All the adult male inhabitants, fiercely-bearded little men like trolls done up in reindeer-skin from top to toe, appeared to be engrossed in the manufacture of sleighs, although the village was already littered and cluttered up with them; and all the ladies were indoors sewing reindeer-skin into trousers or making tea.
Having exchanged a noise like "Sdrastetye" (which in these parts seems to mean "Bon jour") with everybody they saw, our two friends sat on a log, and rested, while Honnell set about sketching, as he calls it, the primitive wooden church. ”

“ He urged his hearers to encourage the silk hat revival.
Sir SQUIRE BANCROFT concurred with the illustrious nobleman who had just spoken. The choice of a hat should be the subject of the most earnest thought, even of prayer. (Cheers.) Not only the shape but the colour. There were hats that were black and hats that were white. (Shouts of "Hurrah!") There were even white hats with black trimming. (Sensation.) The older he grew the more convinced he was that an Englishman's hat was his castle. ”

“ What the meeting desired to ascertain was the views as to this revival that were held by those empowered to offer opinions.
Lord RIBBLESDALE said that there was no doubt that a tall hat was the most becoming headgear for a gentleman. But a certain regard for idiosyncracies was important. No gentleman should take without scrutiny what the hatter offered. Hats were individual things, and as the character changed and developed so should the hat. The hat that suited one at forty might be a sad anachronism at fifty. ”

“ A white bowler and a blue serge suit made as stylish and effective a garb as anyone needed. Soft hats no doubt were comfortable, but they were also slovenly. Moreover they were not practical. At a horse sale, for example, you could not rattle them. As for the plea that tall hats were of value to conjurers, he had no use for such arguments. Conjurers dealt in illusion and all illusion was retrograde. (Oh! Oh!) .
The Bishop of LINCOLN said that he felt bound to dissociate himself from his, partner's remarks. He himself looked upon a silk hat as an essential. (A voice, "With rigging?") ”

“ Louis PARKER reminds you, a French father supplied him with ambition and love of action, an Austrian grandfather with hesitancy, and Spanish ancestors with fatalism, a very trying combination for even the original Eaglet to handle—a mere boy who had never so much as heard of President WILSON'S League of Nation's. ”

“ When, as luck would have it, his wife eloped with a wrestler, a flood of melody poured from his soul which, connoisseurs have assured us, ranks high amongst the lyrical masterpieces of the world. These verses will be found amongst the collection known as "Swan Songs," published posthumously, for, not long after, the poet unfortunately developed phthisis and died. ”

“ When his clothes are so stiff with dirt that they will stand up without any inside assistance from Violet, they are sawn off him and consigned to the incinerator and he is given a new suit. Whenever his back hair has grown so long that it is liable to impede his movements, a posse of grooms is despatched to his lair to rope, throw and shear him with horse-clippers. ”

“ We are hard-pressed to find mischief for our idle hands to do.
Sherlock the Sleuth keeps himself in fair fettle by prowling round the countryside and trying to restrain the aborigines from pinching what little British material they have not already pinched. Yesterday he came upon a fatigue party of Gauls staggering down a by-way under the shell of an Armstrong hut. He whooped and gave chase. The Gauls, sighting the A.P.M. brassard, promptly dumped the hut and dived through a wire fence. Sherlock hitched his horse to a post and followed afoot, snorting fire and brimstone. ”

“ Altogether Miss MARIE LÖHR has been justified of her courage. In a happy little speech from which we learnt that every one of the voices (off) in the Wagram scene was a demobilised voice from the fighting fronts, she told us that her revival of L'Aiglon was intended as a tribute to Art after all these years of War. ”

“ Occasionally the boom of explosions coming from the devastated areas tells us that our brave allies the Chinese are still on deck, salvaging ammunition after their own unique fashion of rapping shells smartly over the nose-caps with sledge-hammers to test whether they be really duds or no. ”

“ Swan, perceiving the moral damage likely to be done to his friend by this flattering incident, sought to puncture Honnell's unhealthy pride by saying, "Plaho?" (or "bad") as a suggestion to the critics; but this only caused them to say repeatedly and with emphasis, "Dobra!"—which was one of Honnell's six words and means "good."
Thus the mischief was done. Honnell returned to his billet a man changed and as it were possessed. To hear him talk now one would suppose culture had fled from the Temperate to the Arctic zone. Of the Lapps' habits and their houses he knows nothing, cares nothing ”

“ Swan, of course, feels quite at home in North Russia and smiles at the people who call it cold and its distances big. Honnell has lived in Edinburgh, so doesn't notice the temperature, though he misses the tramway system. ”

“ It leads up to a situation as novel as it is dramatic—the confession of a young fanatic, who believes in a lady-healer so implicitly that he puts typhoid germs into the drink of a celebrated general in order to provide her with an impressive subject. ”

“ Ronald, our only remaining Red Hat, saves his soul from boredom by keeping all the H.Q. departments open and conducting, on his own, a brisk correspondence between them. As there are about thirty of these and he conducts them all himself it will be understood that this entails a certain amount of movement on his part.
Bob, the Camp Commandant, spends his time trying to square his returns and interviewing Violet. Violet is a middle-aged gentleman who came to us from some Labour unit and refuses to leave. ”

“ The two Chairmen, speaking almost in unison, stated that the meeting had been convened in order that the views of the enlightened might be gathered regarding the proposed revival of the tall hat or topper. A recrudescence of this form of covering for the hair (or otherwise) was threatened under the name of the Victory Derby, and a paragraph in The Times announced that "so remarkable has been the revival in the silk-hat trade that old men who had gone into retirement in the Denton and Stockport districts are being asked to come back and give what productive energy they possess." ”

“ Showily bound they make a favourite school prize and have given entertainment to generations of cultured refined persons, who have never paused in their reading to give a thought to the author of their enjoyment, the sagacious Prince to whose action they owe their emotional treat. ”

“ DEAR VICAR,—I have your letter and quite agree as to the advisability of starting some society for working off the latent energy which has accumulated since the demise of the War and the consequent closing down of War activities. ”

“ Both can say about six words—the same—in Russian, and both have bought a pair of moccasins—Swan because he likes them, and Honnell because he would like to.
Recently they set off together from Kola on the Murman Coast to try to find a village from which jolly little Laplanders and Laplanderesses come sliding and skidding to market behind their stout-hearted reindeer. They left all their picturesque Arctic gear behind them except their moccasins, Swan being one of those trying people who don't care how they look, if only they "mush" along fast enough. ”

“ So Alphonse went, and in his place reigned Ferdinand.
Ferdinand, what there was of him, was a good fellow. He was an old fire-eater. He had lost a leg in Algeria and an eye somewhere else, and he could not comprehend why such trivial matters should disqualify a man for killing pigs. He was, as I have said, a [pg 489] good fellow, but his methods of using a razor were mediaeval. However we were not long for one another, and, as the R.N.V.R. tolerate such things, I grew a beard, an equable, regulation torpedo beard. ”

“ MAIS is not so callow as he once was in his judgement of people mentally distasteful to him, but he still needs a wider outlook on life and a wider knowledge, and I sincerely hope that he will take steps to remove the limitations which at present prevent him from giving entire satisfaction to his admirers. ”

“ MAIS is that he seems to find it perilously easy to write about young school-masters who fall in and out of love with facility and who are financially at their wits' end. Rupert Blundell, the philanderer, described here, is a clear and clever picture of a young man who loved where he listed and listed quite a lot. As far as he goes he can be visualized perfectly both at Oxford and as a schoolmaster. But he does not go far enough and he belongs to a type of which one can easily tire. ”

“ A new race, who had never seen a white man before, is reported to have been found on Prince Albert Land, and one of them is being taken to Maine, U.S.A. That ought to teach them to be discovered again. ”

“ The cost of sending them away to the sea or countryside for fresh air and change of scene is constantly increasing and the Children's Country Holidays Fund cannot keep up its good work without generous help. There can be no better way of making a Peace-offering than by helping to build up the health and strength of the new generation. ”

“ I suppose one could stand up to stick stamps in a book, and would get a certain amount of physical exercise in going about swapping duds and duplicates, but generally speaking it is a sedentary occupation and, to my mind, a selfish one. ”

“ The admirable plan of transplanting Ministers admittedly doing excellent work in their departments just as they are settling down in the saddle, though generally commended by supporters of the Government, is meeting with a certain amount of criticism. ”

“ Señor FERNANDEZ denies the allegation that Mexico is not now at war with any nation. It is supposed to have been spread by jealous rivals.
In the Isle of Sheppey there is not a single person who is drawing the unemployment donation. ”

“ Meanwhile he should adhere to his soft hat.
Mr. MASKELYNE, who followed, urged upon the company the desirability of the silk-hat mode. If tall hats, he said, went out of fashion, what would become of conjurers? Rabbits could be satisfactorily extracted only from tall hats. (Prolonged cheering.) An omelette made in a sombrero was unthinkable. (Renewed cheering.)
Mr. ARNOLD BENNETT said that all this talk about toppers was pernicious nonsense. The topper had become obsolete and should not be disinterred. The only honest form of hat for an honest straightforward man was a white bowler. ”

“ Whips nor spurs weren't allowed in the race, an' peaceful persuasion don't go far with a mule; but about five of 'em pursued the narrow and straight path that leads to the winning-post. A big, raw-boned animal, named Gentle Maggot, floundering along with one foot in the franc side an' tother in the enclosure, with two other feet that couldn't be simultaneously located, was leading, an' a chestnut named Coughdrop was a good second. Red Liz was flapping her long ears an' coming along very genteelly in the rear. When they wus nearly level to us, Nigger whispers to me to get the cracker ready ”

“ From "Answers to Correspondents":
"A bellion, according to the French and American method of numeration, is a thousand millions, or 1,000,000,000. According to the English method, it is a million millions, or 1,000,000,000."—Irish Paper.
We should have liked to know the estimated value of a re-bellion, according to the Irish method, but we understand that there is no accounting for that. ”

“ She calls it Marriage While You Wait (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) , and illustrates her theme with the case of a young man and maiden, who dashed, like so many others, into matrimony in the breathless haste of short leave, and came dangerously near repenting at leisure. Only near, of course; Mrs. BUCKROSE is too confirmed an optimist not to make it clear that the blackest boredom has a silver lining ”

“ Apart from the interest this paragraph will excite in the historians of the Army, the Turf, and the Cricket-field, it shows that HENRY VIII. must have been a more indulgent father than is generally suspected.
[pg 488]
AT THE PLAY. "L'AIGLON."
In a note given away with the programme Mr. LOUIS N. PARKER, describes L'Aiglon as "the Hamlet of the nineteenth century." Certainly they had in common the habits of introspection, and indecision; but the egoism of Hamlet was at least tempered by a knowledge of the world; he was a student ”