that can be made; but the artist and the writer ought to realize that their duty to the world is to perceive what is beautiful and to express it as resolutely, as attractively as they can; if a writer can write a good book, he can talk in its pages to a numerous audience; and he is right to save up his best thoughts for his readers, rather than to let them flow away in diffuse conversation.  Of course a writer of fiction is bound to make the observation of varieties of temperament a duty; it is his material; if he becomes isolated and self-absorbed, his work becomes narrow and mannerized; and it is true, too, that, with most writers, the collision of mind with mind is what produces the brightest sparks.

And then to step into a still wider field, there is no sort of doubt that the formation of reasonable habits, of method, of punctuality, is a duty, not from an exalted point of view, but because it makes enormously for the happiness and convenience of every one about us.  In the old-fashioned story-books a prodigious value, perhaps an exaggerated value, was set upon time; one was told to redeem the time, whatever that might mean.  The ideal mother of the family, in the little books which I used to read in my childhood, was a lady who appeared punctually at breakfast, and had a bunch of keys hanging at her girdle.  Breakfast over, she paid a series of visits, looked into the larder, weighed out stores, and then settled down to some solid reading or embroidered a fire-screen; the afternoon would be spent in visits of benevolence, carrying portions of the midday dinner to her poorer neighbours; the evening would be given to working at the fire-screen again, while some one read aloud.  Somehow it is not an attractive picture, though it need not have been so dull as it appears.  The point is whether the solid reading had a useful effect or not.  In the books I have in view, it generally led the materfamilias into having an undue respect for correct information, and a pharisaical contempt for people who indulged their fancy.  In Harry and Lucy, for instance, Lucy, who is the only human figure in the book, is perpetually being snubbed by the terrible hard-headed Harry, with his desperate interest in machinery, by the repellent father who delights to explain the laws of gravity and the parabola described by the stone which Harry throws.  What was undervalued in those old, dry, high-principled books was the charm of vivid apprehension, of fanciful imagination, of simple, neighbourly kindliness.  The aim was too much to improve everybody and everything, to impart and retain correct information.  Nowadays the pendulum has swung a little too far the other way, and children are too much encouraged, if anything, to be childish; but there is a certain austere charm in the old simple high-minded household life for all that.