AMUSEMENTS, 249 



grayer, some people tliiiik, as forty approaches. 

 Nay, not so ; it grows calmer and more peaceable ; 

 ^nd at the same time it grows more unselfish. 

 Thinking less about ourselves, we learn to think 

 more about other people ; our pleasures come to 

 lie more and more in giving pleasure to those 

 around us. When we look forward to a holiday, 

 we look forward no longer to tlie delights we are 

 ourselves to experience, but to the delight of 

 giving the boys a ride over the grassy hills and 

 taking the girls to the Cliristmas pantomime. 

 Those are pleasures of which it is harder to rob 

 us, and which we could not have appreciated so 

 much in the old days when Plancus was consul. 



Moreover, it is incidental to the active pursuits 

 of pleasure that, when we aim at it too directly, \ 

 we feel alwa3^s the bitterness of disappointment, j 

 and so become cynical and complaining. It is 

 young men and young women who write all tlie 

 Byronic poetry of blighted hopes and blasted 

 aspirations; it is very young people who discover 

 that existence is a mistake, and that the true func- 

 tion of the poet is to write tlirenodies. " Life," 

 said the American boy on his tenth birthday, ''isn't 

 all that it's cracked up to be." "The world is 

 hollow," says the little girl-pessimist in Punchy 

 "and my doll is stuffed with sawdust." That is 

 the natural reaction from a view of life which 

 considers that it ought all to be made up of excit- 



