In a world without humour, the only thing to do is to eat. And how perfect an exception! How can these people strike dignified attitudes, and pretend that things matter, when the total ludicrousness of life is proved by the very method by which it is supported? A man strikes the lyre, and says, "Life is real, life is earnest," and then goes into a room and stuffs alien substances into a hole in his head.--"The Napoleon of Notting Hill." [Sidenote: _G.K. Chesterton_] A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.--"George Bernard Shaw." [Sidenote: _G.K. Chesterton_] Only in our romantic country do you have the romantic thing called weather--beautiful and changeable as a woman. The great English landscape painters (neglected now, like everything that is English) have this salient distinction, that the weather is not the atmosphere of their pictures; it is the subject of their pictures. They paint portraits of the weather. The weather sat to Constable; the weather posed for Turner--and the deuce of a pose it was. In the English painters the climate is the hero; in the case of Turner a swaggering and fighting hero, melodramatic but magnificent. The tall and terrible protagonist robed in rain, thunder, and sunlight fills the whole canvas and the whole foreground. Rich colours actually look more luminous on a grey day, because they are seen aganst a dark background, and seem to be burning with a lustre of their own. Against a dim sky all flowers look like fireworks. There is something strange about them at once vivid and secret, like flowers traced in fire in the grim garden of a witch. A bright blue sky is necessarily the high-light in the picture, and its brightness kills all the bright blue flowers. But on a grey day the larkspur looks like fallen heaven; the red daisies are really the lost red eyes of day, and the sunflower is the vice-regent of the sun. Lastly, there is this value about the colour that men call colourless: that it suggests in some way the mixed and troubled average of existence, especially in its quality of strife and expectation and promise. Grey is a colour that always seems on the eve of changing to some other colour; of brightening into blue, or blanching into white, or breaking into green or gold. So we may be perpetually reminded of the indefinite hope that is in doubt itself; and when there is grey weather on our hills or grey hair on our heads perhaps they may still remind us of the morning.--"Daily News." [Sidenote: _G.K. Chesteron_] Silence is the unbearable repartee.--"Charles Dickens." [Sidenote: _G.K. Chesterton_]