I wish I could get up; I wish I were the world's greatest
Violinist. I wish I had lots of silver, and first Editions, and
green ivory.
_In The Park_
"Yes," I said one afternoon in the Park, as I looked rather
contemptuously at the people of Fashion, moving slow and
well-dressed in the sunshine, "but how about the others, the
Courtiers and Beauties and Dandies of the past? They wore
fine costumes, and glittered for their hour in the summer
air. What has become of them?" I somewhat rhetorically asked.
They were all dead now. Their day was over. They were cold
in their graves.
And I thought of those severe spirits who, in garrets far from
the Park and Fashion, had scorned the fumes and tinsel of the
noisy World.
But, good Heavens! these severe spirits were, it occurred to me,
all, as a matter of fact, quite as dead as the others.
_The Correct_
I am sometimes visited by a suspicion that everything isn't
quite all right with the Righteous; that the Moral Law speaks in
muffled and dubious tones to those who listen most scrupulously
for its dictates. I feel sure I have detected a look of doubt
and misgiving in the eyes of its earnest upholders.
But there is no such shadow or cloud on the faces in Club
windows, or in the eyes of drivers of four-in-hands, or of
fashionable young men walking down Piccadilly. For these live
by a Rule which has not been drawn down from far-off and
questionable skies, and needs no sanction; what they do is
Correct, and that is all. Correctly dressed from head to foot,
they pass, with correct speech and thoughts and gestures,
correctly across the roundness of the Earth.
_"Where Do I Come In?"_
When I read in the _Times_ about India and all its problems and
populations; when I look at the letters in large type of
important personages, and find myself face to face with the
Questions, Movements, and great Activities of the Age, "Where do
I come in?" I ask myself uneasily.
Then in the great _Times_-reflected world I find the corner
where I play my humble but necessary part. For I am one of the
unpraised, unrewarded millions without whom Statistics would be
a bankrupt science. It is we who are born, who marry, who die,
in constant ratios; who regularly lose so many umbrellas, post
just so many unaddressed letters every year. And there are
enthusiasts among us who, without the least thought of their own
convenience, allow omnibuses to run over them; or throw
themselves month by month, in fixed numbers, from the London
bridges.
_Microbes_
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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