of generalisations the facts of what we are vain enough to call the known world?  To know the resemblances of things is even more important than to know the differences of things.  Indeed, if we are not interested in the former, our pleasure in the latter is a mere scrap-book pleasure.  If we are not interested in the latter, on the other hand, our sense of the former is apt to degenerate into guesswork and assertion and empty phrases.  Shakespeare is greater than all the other poets because he, more than anybody else, knew how very like human beings are to each other and because he, more than anybody else, knew how very unlike human beings are to each other.  He was master of the particular as well as of the universal.  How much poorer the world would have been if he had not been so in regard not only to human beings but to the very flowers—­if he had not been able to tell the difference between fennel and fumitory, between the violet and the gillyflower!

IX

THE INTELLECTUAL SIDE OF HORSE-RACING

Horse-racing—­or, at least, betting—­is one of the few crafts that are looked down on by practically everybody who does not take part in it.  “It’s a mug’s game,” people say.  Even betting men talk like this.  There is a street called Mug’s Row in a north of England town:  it is so called because the houses in it were built by a bookmaker.  Whether it was the bookmaker or his victims that gave the street its name I do not know.  To call a bookmaker a mug would seem to most people an abuse of language.  Yet the only bookmaker I have ever really known used to confess himself a mug in the most penitent fashion.  He was a mug, however, not because he could not make money, but because he could not keep it.  The poor of his suburb, when in difficulties, he declared, used always to come to him instead of going to the clergy, and he was unable to refuse them.  But then he was bitter against the clergy.  As a young man, he had been a Sunday school teacher, and so far as I could gather, he might have gone on being a Sunday school teacher till the present day if he had not suddenly been assailed with doubts one Sabbath afternoon as he expounded the story of David and Goliath.  Whether it was that he looked on David as having taken an unsportsmanlike advantage of the giant or whether he doubted that so much could be done with such little stones, he did not make quite clear.  Anyhow, from that day on, he never believed in revealed religion.  He quarrelled with his clergyman.  He broke the Sabbath.  He began to drink beer and to go to race-meetings.  He rapidly rose from the position of carpenter to that of bookmaker, and, were it not for his infernal gift of charity, he would probably now be driving his own car and be hall-marked with a Coalition title.  Even as it was, he was much more prosperous than any carpenter.  Whenever he produced money, it was in pocketfuls and handfuls.