In the Soviet Republic of Russia, I am told, no one can lay claim to the title of worker unless his hands are hardened and roughened by toil, and LENIN and TROTSKY have to take their turns at the rack, like the commonest executioner.  In England we are not nearly so particular about the manual test, and, besides feeling quite kindly disposed towards professional footballers, tea-tasters and the men who stand on Cornish cliffs and shout when they see the pilchard shoals come in, we still give a certain amount of credit to mere brain-work as well.

There is, however, a poisonous idea prevalent, especially amongst the women of this country, that a fellow is not working with his brain unless he is walking rapidly up and down the room with wrinkles on his forehead, or sitting on a hard chair at a table with a file of papers in front of him.  But there is no rule of this sort about the birth of great and beautiful ideas in the human brain.  It is all a matter of individual taste and habit.  I know a man, a poet, who thinks best on the Underground Railway, and that is the reason why he said the other day, “Give me to gaze once more on the blue hills,” to the girl in the booking-office, when what he really wanted was a ticket (of a light heliotrope colour) to St. James’s Park.  Lord BYRON, on the other hand, composed a sorrowful ditty on the decadence of the Isles of Greece whilst shaving; but the invention of the safety-razor and the energetic action of M. VENIZELOS will most likely render it unnecessary for anyone to repeat such a performance.  As for the people who have a sudden bright idea whilst they are dressing for dinner, they may be dismissed at once, for they nearly always go to bed by mistake and, when they wake up again extremely hungry, they have forgotten what it was.

Most experts are really agreed that a recumbent or semi-recumbent position is the best for creative thought, and another friend of mine, also a maker of verses, has patented the very ingenious device of a pair of stirrups just under the mantelshelf, so that, when he sits back in his armchair, he can manage his Pegasus without having his feet continually slipping off the marble surface into the fender.

Much may be said too for a seat in a first-class railway carriage, when you have the compartment all to yourself and the train is going at sixty miles an hour or more.  But England is hardly spacious enough for a really sustained inspiration; and the result of being turned out suddenly at Thurso, N.B., or Penzance is that some opening flower of the human intellect fails to achieve its perfect bloom, and as likely as not your golf clubs are left in the rack.

There is also, of course, an influential school which believes strongly in the early morning tea hour, and people who ought to know tell me that Mr. WINSTON CHURCHILL plans new uniforms for the Guards as well as the campaign in Mesopotamia with pink pyjamas on, and that the PRIME MINISTER can never be persuaded to get up for breakfast until he has hit on a few of those striking repartees which are subsequently translated by his posse of interpreters into Russian, Italian, Bohemian and Erse.