his favourite amusements.  I have never found any difficulty in believing it of him.  It is an odd fact that considerateness, if not actually kindness, to flies has been made one of the tests of gentleness in popular speech.  How often has one heard it said in praise of a dead man:  “He wouldn’t have hurt a fly!” As for those who do hurt flies, we pillory them in history.  We have never forgotten the cruelty of Domitian.  “At the beginning of his reign,” Suetonius tells us “he used to spend hours in seclusion every day, doing nothing but catch flies and stab them with a keenly sharpened stylus.  Consequently, when someone once asked whether anyone was in there with Cæsar, Vibius Crispus made the witty reply:  ’Not even a fly.’” And just as most of us are on the side of the fly against Domitian, so are most of us on the side of the fly against the spider.  We pity the fly as (if the image is permissible) the underdog.  One of the most agonising of the minor dilemmas in which a too sensitive humanitarian ever finds himself is whether he should destroy a spider’s web, and so, perhaps, starve the spider to death, or whether he should leave the web, and so connive at the death of a multitude of flies.  I have long been content to leave Nature to her own ways in such matters.  I cannot say that I like her in all her processes, but I am content to believe that this may be owing to my ignorance of some of the facts of the case.  There are, on the other hand, two acts of destruction in Nature which leave me unprotesting and pleased.  One of these occurs when a thrush eats a snail, banging the shell repeatedly against a stone.  I have never thought of the incident from the snail’s point of view.  I find myself listening to the tap-tap of the shell on the stone as though it were music.  I felt the same sort of mild thrill of pleasure the other day when I found a beautiful spotted ladybird squeezing itself between two apples and settling down to feed on some kind of aphides that were eating into the fruit.  The ladybird, the butterfly, and the bee—­who would put chains upon such creatures?  These are insects that must have been in Eden before the snake.  Beelzebub, the god of the other insects, had not yet any engendering power on the earth in those days, when all the flowers were as strange as insects and all the insects were as beautiful as flowers.

XI

VIRTUE

There is grave danger of a revival of virtue in this country.  There are, I know, two kinds of virtue, and only one of them is a vice Unfortunately, it is the latter a revival of which is threatened to-day.  This is the virtue of the virtuously indignant.  It is virtue that is not content merely to be virtuous to the glory of God.  It has no patience with the simple beauty and goodness of the saints.  Virtue, in the eyes of the virtuously indignant, is hardly worthy to be called virtue unless it goes about like a roaring lion seeking whom it may devour.