“I have sent some parts of my dictionary, such as were at hand, for your inspection. The favour which I ask of you is that if you do not like them, you will say nothing. “I am, sir, “Your most affectionate humble servant, “SAM JOHNSON.” He could not even bear to hear the faithful words of his old friend about the child of his brain, though he felt himself entitled to sign “your most affectionate humble servant.” Like most men of apparently strong common sense, when you look too critically into their dogmata, Johnson’s common sense begins to look more like uncommon foolishness; for it was certainly no answer to Bishop Berkeley’s metaphysics to bang his foot against a stone. It requires a far more subtle argument which must probably be fortified by the eye of faith, which, you remember, has been defined as “the faculty of believing what you know to be untrue.” But Johnson’s argument is the sort of bluff obvious thing that so appeals to a common-sense person like John Bull. And doubtless that is why Johnson has so appealed to John Bull that he has almost been elevated to the pinnacle of a national hero. Full of rats, poor old gentleman; yet one can’t help loving him for his rats. As woman seldom stammers, so she is seldom afflicted by psychasthenia, which, being a variation, appears to be almost confined to the male, like genius. Woman is seldom “ratty”; she has far too much hard common sense. Who ever heard of women killing each other to settle whether a word should be spelt homooisian or homoousian? Or to decide whether there are three Gods or One? Yet men have waged savage tumult over these very things, which no person can possibly know. Sometimes lady novelists seem to go ratty when they try to describe men, and ultimately describe some creature who is like nothing on earth; but it is only fair to say that such lady novelists are suspected by men to be between the ages of forty and fifty, and probably for a time slightly unbalanced. But the normal average woman is far saner than the normal average man. Once she has secured her man her chief duty afterwards seems to be to see that his rats do not lead him away from the paths of respectability, into such nonsense as that of Bernard Palissy, for instance, who burned even his furniture to keep the stove going that might lead to the discovery of a porcelain glaze, even though his wife and children might starve. No woman ever followed a will-o’-the-wisp with such fury, simply because no woman was ever so ratty; it is hardly respectable; it seems to be purely a matter of sex-physiology.