On Something | Page 4

Shoreham Cathedral as a recognition of his great learning and good
work at Durham. Two years later the rectory of St. Vacuums becoming
vacant and it being within the gift of Archdeacon Blunderbuss, he
excited general amazement and much scandal by presenting himself to
the living."
There the paragraph ends. It came in an ordinary society paper. It bore
no marks of ill-will. It came in the midst of a column of the usual silly
adulation of everybody and everything; how it got there is of no
importance. There it stood and the keen eye of Capricorn noted it and
treasured it for years.
I will make no comment upon this paragraph. It may be read slowly or
quickly, according to the taste of the reader; it is equally delicious
either way.
The next excerpt I find in the notebook is as follows:
"More than 15,000,000 visits are paid annually to London
pawnbrokers.
"Jupiter is 1387 times as big as the earth, but only 300 times as heavy.
"The world's coal mines yield 400,000,000 tons of coal a year.
"The value of the pictures in the National Gallery is about £1,250,000."
This tickled Capricorn--I don't know why. Perhaps he thought the style
disjointed or perhaps he had got it into his head that when this

information had been absorbed by the vulgar they would stand much
where they stood before, and be no nearer the end of man nor the
accomplishment of any Divine purpose in their creation. Anyhow he
kept it, and I think he was wise to keep it. One cannot keep everything
of that kind that is printed, so it is well to keep a specimen. Capricorn
had, moreover, intended to perpetuate that specimen for ever in his
immortal prose--pray Heaven he may return to do so!
I next find the following excerpt from an evening paper:
"No more gallant gentleman lives on the broad acres of his native
England than Brigadier-General Sir Hammerthrust Honeybubble, who
is one of the few survivors of the great charge at Tamulpuco, a feat of
arms now half forgotten, but with which England rang during the
Brazilian War. Brigadier-General, or, as he then was, plain Captain
Hammerthrust Honeybubble, passed through five Brazilian batteries
unharmed, and came back so terribly hacked that his head was almost
severed from his body. Hardly able to keep his seat and continually
wiping the blood from his left eye, he rode back to his troop at a walk,
and, in spite of pursuit, finally completed his escape. Sir Hammerthrust,
we are glad to learn, is still hale and hearty in his ninety-third year, and
we hope he may see many more returns of the day upon his patrimonial
estate in the Orkneys."
To this excerpt I find only one marginal note in Capricorn's delicate
and beautiful handwriting: "What day?" But whether this referred to
some appointment of his own I was unable to discover.
I next find a certain number of cuttings which I think cannot have been
intended for the book at all, but must have been designed for poor
Capricorn's "Oxford Anthology of Bad Verse," which, just before he
left England, he was in process of preparing for the University Press.
Capricorn had a very fine sense of bad taste in verse, and the authorities
could have chosen no one better suited for the duty of editing such a
volume. I must not give the reader too much of these lines, but the
following quatrain deserves recognition and a permanent memory:
Napoleon hoped that all the world would fall beneath his sway. He
failed in this ambition; and where is he to-day? Neither the nations of
the East nor the nations of the West Have thought the thing Napoleon
thought was to their interest.
This is enormous. As philosophy, as history, as rhetoric, as metre, as

rhythm, as politics, it is positively enormous. The whole poem is a
wonderful poem, and I wish I had space for it here. It is patriotic and it
is written about as badly as a poem could conceivably be written. It is a
mournful pleasure to think that my dear friend had his last days in the
Old Country illuminated by such a treasure. It is but one of many, but I
think it is the best.
Another extract which catches my eye is drawn from the works of one
in a distant and foreign land. Yet it was worth preserving. This
personage, Tindersturm by name, issued a pamphlet which fell under
the regulations, the very strict regulations, of the Prussian Government,
by which any one of its subjects who says or prints anything calculated
to stir up religious or racial strife within the State is subject to severe
penalties. Now those severe penalties had fallen upon Tindersturm and
he