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of possible calamities still more direful. After a period of enthusiastic laudation from the "jeune fille" type of admirer, poor "Pollyanna" became the target of every penny-a-line hack reviewer and little-wit in Grub Street. They loftily demonstrated that the easing of melancholy by force of imagination is a vastly unscientific thing. Impossible, they vowed! Or, even if possible, it ought not to be; since 'tis a frightfully callow sort of mental regimen, quite unworthy of the mature mind! They all swore 'tis an afront to the eternal verities to be able to stop thinking of the world's evil and to gather a little joy from that idyllic goodness and virtue of which the world undoubtedly possesses, or seems to possess, a little. The "New York Tribune", in fact, deemed the inoffensive "Pollyanna" sufficiently culpable to merit a sneering editorial.
So runs the worldly-wise current of twentieth-century life! Your modern philosopher had rather be mature and miserable, than childlike and contented; and he deems you a monstrous imbecile if you can be happy at a time when he thinks you have not sufficient cause to be happy. Heaviness of spirit, he doth asseverate, is a sacred obligation of every thoughtful and responsible citizen. If you lack woes of your own, then go mourn at the wretched state of mankind in general!
"The Conservative" confesses to no little amusement at the wailing of those worshippers of morbid maturity. He even ventures to exhibit a leaning toward the side of immaturity; for is not maturity but the full-blown precursor of decay! It is dangerous to dabble in realities, and if more of us were able to retain the happy illusions of our infancy, those illusions would be so much nearer truth. Can any of our apostles of sophistication define what they mean by real happiness? Is it not more likely that all happiness is unreal; a golden fabric woven by fairies from the moonbeams of yesterday, and visible, like the Milky Way, only when more garish and conspicuous things are banished from the sight? A moment of retrospection, a snatch of song, a cadence of rhythm, a glance at the blue empyrean, the playing of the sun with the leaves of green trees, a chance act of benevolence--all these things sometimes bring what we uncultured barbarians are pleased to call happiness. Must we be utterly condemned if such happiness be found to have no cause save in physiological reactions or psychological stimuli. It is certainly grateful surcease from the pain of living, and what more could we desire? Is not fragrance fragrance, whether it come from the woodland violet or the stately cedar? If these simple pleasures be only drugs to help us forget reality, then let us accept the oblivion they offer. Nature designed them to soothe the roughnesses of our existence, and we should accept the gift with gratitude, rather than reject it with scorn. On the pleasures of the fancy rests all the mighty framework of art, poesy, and song. Stark, mature reality leads to the suicide's vault.
"The Conservative" has more than once been rather severely taken to task for his love of the idyllic happiness of the unreal. His pastoral verses have been scorned as archaic nonsense, whilst his whole literary style was condemned a year ago by a learned Jew, who with Semitic shrewdness declared that those pages, with their reverence for the storied past, savour of the "play world". But "The Conser-
