steaming brow, bedecks him with a bunch of white ribbons, and jogs jovially to church arm in arm with the pretty cause of all this beneficent disturbance. And the spectacle is mighty taking and commendable; but you'll excuse me for holding that it is not Love. It bears about the same relation to Love that Bumble-puppy bears to good whist. Among the eccentricities that make up the Average Man I find none more diverting than his complacent belief that he is, or has been, or will certainly some day be, in love. As a matter of fact, the capacity to love belongs to one man or woman in ten thousand. Listen to Matthew Arnold: "But in the world I learnt, what there Thou wilt too surely one day prove, That will, that energy, though rare, Are yet far, far less rare than love." I go further and believe it rarer even than Genius. Indeed, the capacity to love, is a specialised form of genius. You understand that I am not commending it. Its possessors are often disreputable and almost always unhappy. Their recompense is that they, and they only, have seen the splendours of the passion, and vibrated to the shaking inner music of the sheep-boy's pipe.