' AMARYLLIS AT THE FAIR ' 287 



just to spend, all your own, and no need to worry when 

 it was gone ! . . . 



' The exquisite delight of utterly abandoned extrava- 

 gance, no counting — anathemas on counting and calcula- 

 tion ! If life be not a dream, what is the use of living ? 



' Say what you wiU, the truth is we all struggle on in 

 hope of living in a dream some day. This is my dream. 

 Dreadfully, horribly wicked, is it not, in an age that 

 preaches thrift and — twaddle ?' 



London seems to him to have something of the ex- 

 uberant carelessness of Nature, still pouring gifts, still 

 inexhaustible, as careless also of men. He says, ' if he 

 could only write the inner life of Fleet Street,' he would 

 vanquish Balzac, Zola, Hugo, ' not in any grace of style 

 or sweeping march of diction, but just pencil-jotted in. 

 the roughest words to hand, just as rich and poor, weU- 

 dressed ladies and next-door beggars are bundled into a 

 train,' In no other book but this, written under the 

 inspiration of London, written ' to describe a bit of human 

 life exactly as it really is,' would he have found a place 

 for Raleigh Pamment, ' late hours, tobacco, whisky, and 

 ballet-dancers writ very large indeed on his broad face,' 

 who was a hero to his valet. The valet ' swore in Raleigh's 

 very words, and used to spit like him.' Jefferies seems to 

 see a breath of the Divine in this sportsman's generous 

 energy, perhaps in his free spending of money. 



It is a medley, * in the Turkish manner,' like life itself, 

 with a Pantagiuelian flow — Red Lion Court, Coate 

 Farm, sweetest fields of love, and early morning pave- 

 ments spotted by expectorations — the rich crowd, and 

 then old Dr. Butler with his ' Hum ! A' have lived 

 twenty years on pork. Let 'n yet it !' and ' If you want 

 to get well, you go for a walk in the maming afore the 

 aair have been braathed auver.' The urn is shaken, 

 but the lot -drawers take their fates in a dream. In no 

 other of his books does his humour, so much despised, show 

 itself so abundantly. He had not humour according to the 

 largest definition that can be given to the word. It was 



