I remember once a parson from the East End preaching a sermon in the school chapel, in which he intimated that in comparison with the loathsome atrocities that had for setting the Mile End Road, a schoolboy merely played at sin. This was reassuring to certain genial sportsmen who had hitherto been unable to view with any confidence the prospect of immortality: and the phrase 'playing at sin' passed into the vocabulary of the school. To such an extent, indeed, that the head master was forced to deliver a special midweek address, in which he pointed out that the degree of sin was relative to environment, and that the moral offences of a man who had been nurtured in surroundings of bestiality and filth were less grave than those of the boy who had spent his childhood in the clean atmosphere of a decent home. The complacence of the aforesaid sportsmen was broken. Not only were their offences as serious as those of their less fortunately placed brethren, they were actually more grave: a disquieting reflection. But I have often felt inclined to question, not the irrefutable logic of the head master's sermon, but the truth of that original contention about 'playing at sin.' Are, that is to say, the vices of the lower orders actually more startling than those of Mayfair? Are they more startling? I wonder: a higher standard of civilisation refines our pleasures, quickens our powers of appreciation, makes us more subtle, more complex; does it not also sharpen the edge of misbehaviour? It is a point on which perhaps Casanova would be able to enlighten us. But, certainly, in the matter of cribbing, the methods of the lower forms are clumsy, unimaginative, bourgeois in comparison with those of the Fifths and Sixths.