son; but the best flattery, the flattery which stimulates most and intoxicates quickest, is given unconsciously. The flattery of the crowd is never intentional, but it is tremendously powerful. It would be interesting to know how many successes and how many failures in the life of any given great man were due to it. Without doubt it strengthens to action; without doubt it is liable to unsteady the reason. Dutch courage, however, may be as good as any other courage at a pinch. For all that, courage is always lost by the drunkard in the end.

Thousands of ordinary men who suffer agonies of self-distrust are saved from actually succumbing to this defect by the flattery of their wives. Perhaps it is wrong to call such a thing flattery, but it is difficult to call unreasoning and undeserved praise by any other name, whether that praise be constantly spoken or constantly suggested. Children, while they can be brutally truthful, are also unconscious adepts at flattery. The kind speech of a child will often elate the hearer to the pitch of hilarity. All day he or she goes under the influence of a delicious stimulant, well knowing, very likely, that the words though sincere are untrue, yet buoyed up by an unreasonable conviction that love is a greater thing than truth. Perhaps the only occasion when conscious flattery may be excused is when it is deliberately made use of by mature men and women who are trying to strengthen some young person whom they see to be in need of a moral or mental fillip. It is often very much more efficacious than censure, and has less serious after-effects, besides the fact that it does not endanger affection. Some otherwise worthy persons make use of a little flattery as an antidote to be offered to those who suffer habitually from the worse intoxication of unreasonable anger. Put

down in black and white, the expedient seems rather despicable. The explanation of most small sins can only be adequately studied under temptation. One thing may be said for certain: those people who have never in their lives felt the temptation to flatter, who have never longed to give pleasure or soothe pain, obtain regard or excite high spirits, by a few words of friendly exaggeration, are unlovable people-as inhuman as those whose cheeks have never glowed from the generous draught.

The result of a moderate amount of flattery upon the ordinary man is to increase his faith in himself. The danger is lest it should increase that faith to credulity, or even to fanaticism. When a man begins to boast it is a pretty sure sign he has had too much flattery. It is a mere question of manners whether or no we openly and aggressively over-value our possessions, but for a man blatantly to over-value his opinions and recount the occasions of his verbal success is as a rule a question of his metaphorical sobriety. There are, one must admit, certain persons who would seem to be born drunk. They are always full of themselves, and the stranger who is not familiar with their habitual condition imagines them to be full of new wine, the new wine of flattery. As a rule, however, states of blatant self-sufficiency are shortlived, and go off with a headache. Intoxication by flattery does not, we hasten to add, exhibit the same symptoms in all cases. In some it engenders a silent and happy superiority, a blissful state which only the very critical would grudge, but which is nevertheless a dangerous state, one in which any man may fear to take an important step.

It is, we think, true to say that women have better heads for flattery than men. On the other hand, flattery is not offered to them in so many

kinds. Ordinary women are subjected to flattery only while they are young. They are flattered for their beauty or their charm. The effect of the intoxicant upon them is like the effect of champagne--it is soon gone. Very few women are flattered on the score of their abilities-partly perhaps because they flatter themselves unduly upon them. An able woman is not generally very much admired on the score of her talent either by her own or by the opposite sex. Marked intellectual or artistic talent is not so very common among women. George Eliot, it is true, was said to be habitually "the worse" for flattery. Miss Austen received less, and it certainly had no effect upon her head. The whole acting profession seems to outsiders to live in a chronic state of unnatural exhilaration due to flattery. The luxury of the ordinary world is the necessity of "the profession." It is impossible to say what they would be like without flattery. An actor or an actress suffering from what is vulgarly called "the want of it" is, We understand, a very depressing sight.

Flattery, when all is said, is not more of an intoxicant than money, though more people are able to withstand its effects. We do not need to be millionaires in order to feel its heady influence. There are temperaments to whom economy is impossible. They may be scrupulously honest, but when they are flush of money they must spend it. Occasionally the effect of an influx of money, even though the amount be small, is perceptible in its effects upon the whole man. The workman when he gets his wages is not exactly the same man he was the day before, even though he be a teetotaler. One often hears it said it is a most unjust generalization that extravagant people are mean. No doubt selfish people are

not made unselfish by money, but it would be more true to say that some people's generosity is but a manifestation of their natural extravagance. Money goes to their heads; they cannot keep it, and lest they spend it on themselves they give it away. It is easier far for a man of the spending temperament to force himself to generosity, and so reconcile his financial insobriety to his conscience, than to force himself to money moderation. This is especially true of those who make money easily or who make it with trouble and pain out of nothing. However vain a writer may be, he seldom altogether loses the sense of pleasant surprise which comes over him when he first gets golden money in exchange for his ink and paper. They are more susceptible to the exciting influence of money than thosewho make it by merchandise or come into it by inheritance. There is a great joy, however reprehensible the moralist may consider the sentiment, in money intoxication. We do not know if millionaires ever feel it to the full. We feel pretty sure that men of solid fortune seldom do. They get less acute delight out of money than any. A very little money serves to get delightfully drunk on, if such a rough word may be used even in a metaphor to express the exhilaration which comes of the knowledge that one has something to spend-somemoney, we mean, which is not a mere token representing bread or bills. Who will say that life is not worth having while he can eat with an appetite, buy, even on the smallest scale,. without calculation, and give to please, not to relieve?

one.

Oddly enough, work acts as an intoxicant on some temperaments. Some men are enamoured of their work. They become obsessed and excited by it. We know they have been overworking not because they look dull

or tired, but because they are unnaturally energetic and bright. We see that they have had too much of some stimulant, but they do not know it themselves. A short life and a busy one is their motto. Length of days is perhaps not the greatest of their sacrifices. No leisure means no friends. Leisure would seem at times to have intoxicating qualities. We are told in our youth that those who will not or need not work become dull and devitalized. Our instructors compare such persons to cabbages. Many of us believe this wholesome teaching all our lives, and pass it on to our children. But when we come to look at our own experience, does it carry out this generally accepted theory? Too much leisure may, it is true, impair the powers, but we would maintain that it very seldom dulls the mind, The Spectator.

no matter from what class we draw our leisured man. We doubt if a talkative tramp would prove worse company than his hard-working brother. Work, we do believe, improves the judgment and develops many valuable qualities, but it is not as necessary either to brain or character as is commonly supposed. When leisure intoxicates, the fancy runs riot -the emotions prevail against the reason-and the sense of proportion disappears. "Fullness of bread and abundance of idleness" is still the largest cause of folly. Many men, however, can stand a very great deal of leisure without apparent detriment to their mental or moral health, especially when they get used to it. The same thing is true of flattery. Unfortunately no man is a judge of his own "head."

I am not what is called an early riser. On the other hand, I sit up late at night. It seems to me just as human and meritorious a proceeding, although the copy-books give one no credit for it. It has always been a custom to sneer at the man who lies abed while the rest of the world is up and doing; but the merits of the man who remains up and doing while the rest of the world is snoring under blankets have never been sufficiently recognized. Such is the force of inherited prejudice, however, that I feel no pride in my nightly feat of sitting up reading or talking till the small hours, whereas, if by any chance I do get up fairly early in the morning, I am filled with an unwonted sense of virtue and heroism, and behave as if I accepted all the conventional superstitions-that man who rises early has a sense of buoyancy and clarity of mind, and

a

inspires in these early hours a store of energy lasting throughout a long day. The truth with me is exactly the contrary. If I sit up till two in the morning and rise at nine, I feel fit and well and have as much appetite for work as it is possible for me to have, and a zest for any kind of amusement that the day may bring which is, I am glad to say, unfailing. If, on the contrary, I go to bed at half-past ten and get up at six I spend the night in stark wakefulness, and go out into the world with a sense of heroism, it is true, but also with a slight sense of dissipation. I have a faint burning sensation in the eyes, feel strangely languid and drowsy, am incommoded by the sensation that I have swallowed and am carrying about with me a smouldering coal, have no appetite whatever for breakfast, and probably doze off into an uneasy slumber

about 11 A. M. Mere early rising-getting up before other people, that is to say-seems to me an overrated virtue, chiefly esteemed as a means of getting the better of other people. We all know the proverbial breakfast of the early bird. Well, I do not want the fattest worm; I am more than content that someone else should have it; and a little bit of quite a lean one will do for me, provided that I am let alone to choose for myself what I think desirable, and to fix the standard by which I shall measure my own wisdom or folly.

All the same, as I say, I got up this morning and went out to taste the first breath of summer in London streets that were strangely unfamiliar. All the houses in my neighborhood were shut and shuttered as in the middle of August; the streets were almost empty except for a few pedestrians of an unfamiliar kind. A group of housebreakers were assembling to begin their dusty job of destruction; a chimney-sweep was wheeling a little handcart full of brushes and soot, with the legend "established 1851" painted on it; and this furnished me with some reflections on the nature of pride, and on how, even in being a chimneysweep for three score years and ten, there may be something more than labor and sorrow. Cats sat unashamed in the middle of roadways which at other hours are filled with the brimming tide of wheeled traffic, and there were long unwonted vistas, such as the lion on Dickens and Jones' shop in Regent street seen in a perspective from Park Lane, a suggestion of blue hills filling the opening of Orchard Street, and the spire of Harrow Church standing apparently at the end of Park Street. There were no taxis nor motor-omnibuses running, but I found a hansom which took me at an agreeable trot along the empty streets. And the first discovery that I made

was that London, at any rate in the West End, goes back to her more innocent ways in these early morning hours. Motor-cars are almost entirely absent, hansom-cab drivers, milkmen, dustmen and costermongers alone occupying the thoroughfares, and there is peace and silence, and a taste of the old thrill of a more sober, spacious, and dignified London.

My destination was Covent Garden, for I had never seen Covent Garden in the early morning; that being one of the many exciting and agreeable things which all Londoners are supposed to have done, and many pretend to have done, but few in fact have done. All the rest of the West End was deserted, but in the neighborhood of Garrick Street my hansom was blocked by a line of carts bearing fruit and flowers and vegetables. Here I met a friend by appointment, and together we strolled for a little round a network of streets all of which were entirely filled with horse-drawn carriers' carts. Whoever else was asleep, there was plenty of life going on here, and as yet we were only on the outskirts. How the traffic changes from hour to hour in these narrow London thoroughfares! One hour of the day they will be traversed by heavy motor-vans, and those huge wagons that the railway companies scatter from their stations; at another hour there will be nothing but lines of carriages and motors and taxicabs, with shining lamps and varnish, and throngs of liveried servants; but now there was nothing but the smell of flowers and fruit, and brilliant splashes of color, and horses tossing their nosebags, and all the ancient business of collecting and distributing the fruits of the earth. One was continually being jostled by people bearing pine boxes which might contain any edible vegetable thing from cabbages to strawberries, from mushrooms to asparagus; the wilderness had blos

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somed like the rose, and the morning air smelled like a garden. All the porters and burden bearers were engaged on the same business, and knew and greeted each other; but we felt like idlers and strangers who had strayed into a foreign city where we did not know the language. As we drew nearer to the centre of this great commotion of flowers and fruit the throng became denser, and the menace of wooden boxes swiftly borne on broad shoulders became greater. I have said that the scene was curiously foreign; and so it was, but only perhaps because a Londoner is more familiar with such scenes in foreign places than in his own town. There were certainly two particularly English characteristics in the occasion. One was its silence. There was practically shouting, and not much conversation, and as the commodities were all being carried by hand from the market to the waiting carts in the adjacent streets there was little sound of traffic other than of feet on the pavement. In any foreign town there would have been yelling and gesticulating, a carnival of sound as well as of movement. Even in Ireland or in Scotland, what I remember of such morning scenes is that they are accompanied by loud shouting. But here the swift streams of movement ran quietly, and those who greeted each other did not need to raise their voices. And the other notable thing was the extraordinary order and efficiency with which the whole business of transportation was The Saturday Review.

carried out. Everything, even the purchase, seemed to have been settled long ago. It was as if people were carrying out, not a commercial transaction of the moment, but a law of nature as old as mankind. The organization was perfect; it was not an artificial or a disciplined organization, but a natural organization. In France or Germany or America, for example, there would have been policemen and officials at every corner; queues would have been formed, and the whole business carried on under the iron hand of authority. But here the order was natural and spontaneous, like that of people long used to seemly and efficient ways. Out of this great cornucopia a delicious plenty of color and light was flowing in immense volume, and in every direction, but, as I said, the organization was spontaneous; the flood had not to be kept in by dykes and groins and embankments; it ran in natural channels that Time and itself had worn, and ran without inconvenience or risk or confusion.

And now I am nearly falling asleep, having done little justice to my theme. For that you must blame this indulgence in the virtue of early rising, and the fact that when I should have been quietly asleep in my bed I was idling and dissipating among the flowers. The next time I go to Covent Garden I shall stay up all night; I shall then merely go to bed a little later than usual, and rise a little later-a much more orderly proceeding.

Filson Young.

Two more plays,-Pericles, Prince of Tyre and The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus-are added to the Tudor Shakespeare, published by the Macmillan Company. The first is edited

by Professor C. Alphonso Smith of the University of Virginia and the second by Elmer Edgar Stoll, Ph.D. Each volume has a photogravure frontispiece and both are fully furnished