"More than 15,000,000 visits are paid annually to London pawnbrokers.
"Jupiter is 1387 times as big as the earth, but only 300 times as heavy.
"The world's coal mines yield 400,000,000 tons of coal a year.
"The value of the pictures in the National Gallery is about £1,250,000."
This tickled Capricorn--I don't know why. Perhaps he thought the style
disjointed or perhaps he had got it into his head that when this
information had been absorbed by the vulgar they would stand much where
they stood before, and be no nearer the end of man nor the accomplishment
of any Divine purpose in their creation. Anyhow he kept it, and I think
he was wise to keep it. One cannot keep everything of that kind that
is printed, so it is well to keep a specimen. Capricorn had, moreover,
intended to perpetuate that specimen for ever in his immortal prose--pray
Heaven he may return to do so!
I next find the following excerpt from an evening paper:
"No more gallant gentleman lives on the broad acres of his native England
than Brigadier-General Sir Hammerthrust Honeybubble, who is one of the
few survivors of the great charge at Tamulpuco, a feat of arms now
half forgotten, but with which England rang during the Brazilian War.
Brigadier-General, or, as he then was, plain Captain Hammerthrust
Honeybubble, passed through five Brazilian batteries unharmed, and came
back so terribly hacked that his head was almost severed from his body.
Hardly able to keep his seat and continually wiping the blood from his
left eye, he rode back to his troop at a walk, and, in spite of pursuit,
finally completed his escape. Sir Hammerthrust, we are glad to learn, is
still hale and hearty in his ninety-third year, and we hope he may see
many more returns of the day upon his patrimonial estate in the Orkneys."
To this excerpt I find only one marginal note in Capricorn's delicate
and beautiful handwriting: "What day?" But whether this referred to some
appointment of his own I was unable to discover.
I next find a certain number of cuttings which I think cannot have been
intended for the book at all, but must have been designed for poor
Capricorn's "Oxford Anthology of Bad Verse," which, just before he
left England, he was in process of preparing for the University Press.
Capricorn had a very fine sense of bad taste in verse, and the authorities
could have chosen no one better suited for the duty of editing such a
volume. I must not give the reader too much of these lines, but the
following quatrain deserves recognition and a permanent memory:
Napoleon hoped that all the world would fall beneath his sway. He failed
in this ambition; and where is he to-day? Neither the nations of the East
nor the nations of the West Have thought the thing Napoleon thought was to
their interest.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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