girl from the Post Office, who has a temperament and is known to be the author of the greatest blank-verse tragedy of the time, a work so far above its age that no theatrical manager will look at it? Think of--William Shakespeare, Stratford and London, age 35, Married, Three Children, Occupation--Player; or William Wordsworth, Rydal Mount, Distributor of Stamps, Married, Church of England, and so on; these things are at once grotesque and pitiful. A man in prison is simply known by a number, and it is said that this alone tends to make him lose some of his self-respect. So, too, when we find ourselves subjected to this bowelless process, when we are bending over the printed forms and staring dully at their stupid demands, something of the same kind is happening to us as we answer question after question; we feel our personality evaporating as it were; the lines growing more angular and the colours fading; until what is left is not even a caricature, not even a flickering shadow of our real essential selves. And all the while we know that we carry with us a personality, richly deft and fantastically coloured, something as opulent as the Indies and as mysterious as China. Hence the irritation, the depression, the half instinctive revolt, the protest that does not even find words for itself. And we shall do well as the forms come snowing down upon us, to recognise the revolt and assert the protest, for it may be that when we come to the end of filling in these things, we shall find ourselves to be nothing better than the paltry details we have so often set down: we shall have lost our souls. THREE MEN The first is (or was) a schoolmaster. When he was in his later teens, long before I met him, he had worked for an Oxford scholarship, and he had worked so hard that a few days before the examination he was found at a late hour babbling incoherently over his books, a nervous wreck. He never took the examination and never went to Oxford, but, when he recovered, passed into a little day-school. Nevertheless, Oxford had entered into his soul. To me, he was more like an Oxford man, or what an Oxford man ought to be, than any other person I have ever met. He had all the larger and more genial traits clearly marked, with just the least delicious hint of pleasant caricature, like a good actor presenting a character-study of a younger Don. There were little peculiar traits too, as of some mythical college, of a ghostly Balliol or an unsubstantial ‘House.’ It may have been the result of deliberate cultivation, or it may have been the gift of one of the younger gods, a compensation for that disastrous breakdown; I do not know, but it was harmless enough, and delicate fooling for a spectator.