He has a soul like a Persian rug. Many-coloured are his ways, his speech. He delights in alliteration of colours, and avails himself of it when he dips pen into ink. He is fond of confusing the technical terms of the Seven Arts, writing that "stuffing the ballot-box is no greater crime than constipated harmonics." But what he doesn't know is that such expressions as gamut of colours, scales, harmonies, tonal values belong to the art of painting, and not alone to music. He is fonder of anecdote and gossip than of history. But what's the use! You can't carve rotten wood. Our critic will quote for you, with his gimlet eye of a specialist boring into your own, the story which was whispered to Anthony Trollope (in 1857, please don't forget) if he would be so kind (it was at the Uffizi Galleries, Florence) as to show him the way to the Medical Venus. This is marvellous humour, and worth a ton of critical comment (which, by Apollo! it be). But, as Baudelaire puts it: "Nations, like families, produce great men against their will"; and our critic is "produced," not made. In the realm of the blind, the cock-eyed is king. The critic is said to be the most necessary nuisance--after women--in this "movie" world of ours. But all human beings are critics, aren't they? THE MOCK PSYCHIATRIST If for the dog the world is a smell, for the eagle a picture, for the politician a Nibelung hoard, then for the psychiatrist life is a huge, throbbing nerve. He dislikes, naturally, the antivivisectionists, but enjoys the moral vivisection of his fellow creatures. It's a mad world for him, my masters! And if your ears taper at the top, beware! You have the morals of a faun; or, if your arms be lengthy, you are a reversion to a prehistoric type. The only things that are never too long, for our friend the "expert" of rare phobias, are his bills and the length of his notice in the newspapers. If he agrees with Charles Lamb that Adam and Eve in Milton's Paradise behave too much like married people, he quickly resents any tracing of a religion to an instinct or a perception. He maintains that religious feeling is only "a mode of reaction," and our conscience but a readjusting apparatus. His trump-card is the abnormal case, and if he can catch tripping a musician, a poet, a painter, he is professionally happy. Homer nodded. Shakespeare plagiarised. Beethoven drank. Mozart liked his wife's sister. Chopin coughed. Turner was immoral. Wagner, a little how-come-ye-so! Hurray! Cracked souls, and a Donnybrook Fair of the emotions. The psychiatrist can diagnose anything from rum-thirst to sudden death. Nevertheless, in his endeavour to assume the outward appearance of a veritable man of science, the psychiatrist reminds one of the hermit-crab as described in E. H. Banfield's Confessions of a Beach Comber (p. 132). "The disinterested spectator," remarks Professor Banfield, "may smile at the vain, yet frantically anxious efforts of