The cause of peace, like all triumphant causes, good as they may be, had made many second-rate friends. It had become safe, and even sound, for the worldly to follow. The dullards, the people who live by phrases alone, the scribes who write by rote and not with authority--most of these had drifted into its service. It had become a provocation, a challenge, vexing those "discoursing wits" who "count it," Bacon says, "a bondage to fix a belief." A rebound had to come. And those arch-rebounders were men of the teaching and writing trades, wherein the newest fashions in thought are most eagerly canvassed, and any inveterate acquiescence in mere common sense afflicts many bosoms with the fear of lagging yards and yards behind the foremost files of time; perhaps--that keenest agony--of having nothing piquant or startling to say, no little bombs handy for conversational purposes. "I sat down," the deserving young author says in _The Vicar of Wakefield_, "and, finding that the best things remained to be said on the wrong side, I resolved to write a book that should be wholly new. I therefore dressed up three paradoxes with some ingenuity. They were false, indeed, but they were new. The jewels of truth have been so often imported by others that nothing was left for me to import but some splendid things that, at a distance, looked every bit as well." "Peace on earth, good-will towards men," "Blessed are the peacemakers"--these and the like might be jewels; but they were demoded; they were old tags; they were clichés of bourgeois morality; they were _vieux jeu_, like the garnets with which, in _She Stoops to Conquer_, the young woman of fashion declined to be pacified when her heart cried out for the diamonds. IV