be, a dirty poem.  Love, even of the wandering and polygynous kind, does not express itself in such images.  Only while under the dominion of the youthful heresy of ugliness could a poet pretend that it did.  The flea, according to the authorities, is “remarkable for its powers of leaping, and nearly cosmopolitan.”  Even so, it has found no place in the heart or fancy of man.  There have been men who were indifferent to fleas, but there have been none who loved them, though if my memory does not betray me there was a famous French prisoner some years ago who beguiled the tedium of his cell by making a pet and a performer of a flea.  For the world at large, the flea represents merely hateful irritation.  Mr W.B.  Yeats has introduced it into poetry in this sense in an epigram addressed “to a poet who would have me praise certain bad poets, imitators of his and of mine”: 

     You say as I have often given tongue
     In praise of what another’s said or sung,
     ’Twere politic to do the like by these,
     But where’s the wild dog that has praised his fleas?

When we think of the sufferings of human beings and animals at the hands—­if that is the right word—­of insects, we feel that it is pardonable enough to make faces at creatures so inconsiderate.  But what strikes one as remarkable is that the insects that do man most harm are not those that horrify him most.  A lady who will sit bravely while a wasp hangs in the air and inspects first her right and then her left temple will run a mile from a harmless spider.  Another will remain collected (though murderous) in presence of a horse-fly, but will shudder at sight of a moth that is innocent of blood.  Our fears, it is evident, do not march in all respects with our sense of physical danger.  There are insects that make us feel that we are in presence of the uncanny.  Many of us have this feeling about moths.  Moths are the ghosts of the insect world.  It may be the manner in which they flutter in unheralded out of the night that terrifies us.  They seem to tap against our lighted windows as though the outer darkness had a message for us.  And their persistence helps to terrify.  They are more troublesome than a subject nation.  They are more importunate than the importunate widow.  But they are most terrifying of all if one suddenly sees their eyes blazing crimson as they catch the light.  One thinks of nocturnal rites in an African forest temple and of terrible jewels blazing in the head of an evil goddess—­jewels to be stolen, we realise, by a foolish white man, thereafter to be the object of a vendetta in a sensational novel.  One feels that one’s hair would be justified in standing on end, only that hair does not do such things.  The sight of a moth’s eye is, I fancy, a rare one for most people.  It is a sight one can no more forget than a house on fire.  Our feelings towards moths being what they are, it is all the more surprising that superstition should connect the moth so much less than the butterfly with