It is characteristic of our nation to feel an imperative need for occupation.  I suppose that there is no nation in the world which has so little capacity for doing nothing gracefully, and enjoying it, as the English.  This characteristic is part of our strength, because it testifies to a certain childlike vitality.  We are impatient, restless, unsatisfied.  We cannot be happy unless we have a definite end in view.  The result of this temperament is to be seen at the present time in the enormous and consuming passion for athletic exercise in the open air.  We are not an intellectual nation, and we must do something; we are wealthy and secure, and, in default of regular work, we have got to organize our hours of leisure on the supposition that we have something to do.  I have little doubt that if we became a more intellectual nation the change would be signalized by an immense output of inferior books, because we have not the student temperament, the gift of absorbing literature.  We have a deep instinct for publicity.  If we are athletically gifted, we must display our athletic prowess in public.  If we have thoughts of our own, we must have a hearing; we look upon meditation, contemplation, conversation, the arts of leisurely living, as a waste of time; we are above all things practical.

But I would pass on to consider the case of more serious writers; and I would begin by making a personal confession.  My own occupations are mainly literary; and I would say frankly that there seems to me to be no pleasure comparable to the pleasure of writing.  To find a congenial subject, and to express that subject as lucidly, as sincerely, as frankly as possible, appears to me to be the most delightful occupation in the world.  Nature is full of exquisite sights and sounds, day by day; the stage of the world is crowded with interesting and fascinating personalities, rich in contrasts, in characteristics, in humour, in pathos.  We are surrounded, the moment we pass outside of the complex material phenomena which surround us, by all kinds of wonderful secrets and incomprehensible mysteries.  What is this strange pageant that unrolls itself before us from hour to hour? this panorama of night and day, sun and moon, summer and winter, joy and sorrow, life and death?  We have all of us, like Jack Horner, our slice of pie to eat.  Which of us does not know the delighted complacency with which we pull out the plums?  The poet is silent of the moment when the plate is empty, when nothing is left but the stones; but that is no less impressive an experience.

The wonderful thing to me is, not that there is so much desire in the world to express our little portion of the joy, the grief, the mystery of it all, but that there is so little.  I wish with all my heart that there was more instinct for personal expression; Edward FitzGerald said that he wished we had more lives of obscure persons; one wants to know what other people are thinking and feeling about it all; what