Why I so hate a book, and those articles in _The Times_, and even the letters, is that the printed word never can convey the virtue of the soul. The _aroma_ is not there--it evaporates when printed--a scentless product, flat and stale like a bad bottle of champagne. It is like an embalmed corpse. Personality, which is the soul of man, is absent from the reader. It is a man’s personality that is the living thing, and in the other world that is the thing you will meet. I have often asked ecclesiastics--“What period of life will the resurrected body represent?” It has always been a poser for them! There will not be any bodies, thank God! we have had quite enough trouble with them down below here. St. Paul distinctly says that it is a spiritual body in the Resurrection. It is our Personalities that will talk to each other in Heaven. I don’t care at what age of a man’s life, even when toothless and decrepit and indistinguishable as he may then be, yet like another Rip Van Winkle, when he speaks you know him. However, that’s a digression. What I want to rub in is this: The man who reads this in his armchair in the Athenæum Club would take it all quite differently if I could walk up and down in front of him and shake my fist in his face. (It was a lovely episode this recalls to my mind. King Edward--God bless him!--said to me once in one of my moments of wild enthusiasm: “Would you kindly leave off shaking your fist in my face?”) I tried once, so as to make the dead print more lifelike, using different kinds of type--big Roman block letters for the “fist-shaking,” large italics for the cajoling, small italics for the facts, and ordinary print for the fool. The printer’s price was ruinous, and the effect ludicrous. But I made this compromise and he agreed to it--whenever the following words occurred they were to be printed in large capitals: “Fool,” “Ass,” “Congenital Idiot.” Myself, I don’t know that I am singular, but I seldom read a book. I look at the pages as you look at a picture, and grasp it that way. Of course, I know what the skunks will say when they read this--“Didn’t I tell you he was superficial? and here he is judged out of his own mouth.” I do confess to having only one idea at a time, and King Edward found fault with me and said it would be my ruin; so I replied: “Anyhow, I am stopping a fortnight with you at Balmoral, and I never expected that when I entered the Navy, penniless, friendless, and forlorn!” Besides, didn’t Solomon and Mr. Disraeli both say that whatever you did you were to do it with all your might? You can’t do more than one thing at a time with all your might--that’s Euclid. Mr. Disraeli added something to Solomon--he said “there was nothing you couldn’t have if only you wanted it enough.” And such is my only excuse for whatever success I have had. I have only had one idea at a time. _Longo intervallo_, I have been a humble, and I endeavoured to be an unostentatious, follower of our Immortal Hero.