"It was Mr. Will Crooks, the well-known Labour member, who asked the Chairman if the House might sing 'God Save the King,' and when Mr. Crooks started it in his deep bass voice everyone stood up and joined in the singing."--_Westminster Gazette._ "Moreover, Mr. Crooks had pitched the tune a little too high, and it seemed for a moment that he with his rich high tenor voice would have to sing the anthem as a solo."--_Daily Chronicle._ * * * * * UNWRITTEN LETTERS TO THE KAISER. No. II. (_From the Rev. Dr. DRYANDER, Court Chaplain._) MOST ALLGRACIOUS SIR,--Now that I have finished writing my sermon for next Sunday I can find time for a little quiet sound thinking by way of a change. I can say quite seriously that I am tired to death of writing and preaching sermons. It is not permitted, highly honoured EMPEROR, that in my sermon I say anything displeasing to your Imperial self. I must not remind you that you are a man like other men, a man liable to weakness and error, swayed by temper, capable, since your position gives you power, of trampling on the rights of others in a moment of passion, of confounding justice with your own desires and of mistaking the promptings of ambition or malice or envy for an inspiration from Heaven itself. No, I must not say all this or any of it, but, on the contrary, I must describe you to yourself and your family and the chosen intimates who flatter you beyond even my power to flatter, I must describe you, I say, as the Lord's, anointed, as the vice-gerent of God on earth, as being raised by God's favour above all human foibles, in short, as being supremely right and just whenever your faults and your injustice cry aloud for the divine punishment. Even if you were a thoroughly good and sensible man, _totus teres atque rotundus_, instead of being a bundle of caprice and prejudice, the task would be difficult. As it is, it is unpleasant and ought to be impossible. My sermons exist to prove that I have attempted it with such courage as I could command, although in these conditions courage is only another name for the cowardly compliance that causes a man to detest himself and to take a low view of human nature.