The Journal of a Disappointed Man

Lacépède composed his Histoire des Poissons during the French Revolution. Then there were Diogenes and Archimedes. This defence of course implicates me in an unbounded opinion of the importance of my own work. "He is quite the little poet," some one said of Keats. "It is just as if a man remarked of Buonaparte," said Keats, in a pet, "that he's quite the little general." A Woman and a Child On the way to the Albert Hall came upon the most beautiful picture of young maternity that ever I saw in my life. She was a delightfully girlish young creature--a perfect phœnix of health and beauty. As she stood with her little son at the kerb waiting for a 'bus, smiling and chatting to him, a luminous radiance of happy, satisfied maternal love, maternal pride, womanliness streamed from her and enveloped me. We got on the same 'bus. The little boy, with his long hair and dressed in velvet like little Lord Fauntleroy, said something to her--she smiled delightedly, caught him up on her knees and kissed him. Two such pretty people never touched lips before--I'm certain of it. It was impossible to believe that this virginal creature was a mother--childbirth left no trace. She must have just budded off the baby boy like a plant. Once, in her glance, she took me in her purview, and I knew she knew I was watching her. In travelling backwards from Kensington Gardens to the boy again, her gaze rested on me a moment and I, of course, rendered the homage that was due. As a matter of fact there was no direct evidence that she was the mother at all.