Will they consent to be told their faults as meekly?  Will they buy the photograph of their physician, or heave half a brick at him?  It remains to be seen.  In the meantime it would be a mistake to assume that the middle class counts for nothing, even at an election.  As to ideas, have we got any new ones since 1871?  ’To be consequent and powerful,’ says Arminius, ’men must be bottomed on some vital idea or sentiment which lends strength and certainty to their action.’  There are those who tell us that we have at last found this vital idea in those conceptions of the British Empire which Mr. Chamberlain so vigorously trumpets.  To trumpet a conception is hardly a happy phrase, but, as Mr. Chamberlain plays no other instrument, it is forced upon me.  Would that we could revive Arminius, to tell us what he thinks of our new Ariel girdling the earth with twenty Prime Ministers, each the choicest product of a self-governing and deeply-involved colony.  Is it a vital or a vulgar idea?  Is it merely a big theory or really a great one?  Is it the ornate beginning of a Time, or but the tawdry ending of a period?  At all events, it is an idea unknown to Arminius von Thunder-Ten-Tronckh, and we ought to be, and many are, thankful for it.

TAR AND WHITEWASH

I am, I confess it, hard to please.  If a round dozen of Bad Women, all made in England too, does not satisfy me, what will?  What ails the fellow at them?  Yet was I at first dissatisfied, and am, therefore, glad to notice that whilst I was demurring and splitting hairs the great, generous public was buying the Lives of Twelve Bad Women, by Arthur Vincent, and putting it into a second edition.  This is as it should be.  When the excellent Dean Burgon dubbed his dozen biographies Twelve Good Men, it probably never occurred to him that the title suggested three companion volumes; but so it did, and two of them, Twelve Bad Men and Twelve Bad Women, have made their appearance.  I still await, with great patience, Twelve Good Women.  Twelve was the number of the Apostles.  Had it not been, one might be tempted to ask, Why twelve?  But as there must be some limit to bookmaking, there is no need to quarrel with an arithmetical limit.

My criticism upon the Dean’s dozen was that they were not by any means, all of them, conspicuously good men; for, to name one only, who would call old Dr. Routh, the President of Magdalen, a particularly good man?  In a sense, all Presidents, Provosts, Principals, and Masters of Colleges are good men—­in fact, they must be so by the statutes—­but to few of them are given the special notes of goodness.  Dr. Routh was a remarkable man, a learned man, perhaps a pious man—­undeniably, when he came to die, an old man—­but he was no better than his colleagues.  This weakness of classification has run all through the series, and it is my real quarrel with it.  I do not understand the principle