An Englishman's Never So Natural As When

Life Is, In Fact, A Battle. Evil Is Insolent And Strong; Beauty Enchanting, But Rare; Goodness Very Apt To Be Weak; Folly Very Apt To Be Defiant; Wickedness To Carry The Day; Imbeciles To Be In Great Places, People Of Sense In Small, And Mankind Generally Unhappy. But The World As It Stands Is No Narrow Illusion, No Phantasm, No Evil Dream Of The Night; We Wake Up To It, Forever And Ever; And We Can Neither Forget It Nor Deny It Nor Dispense With It.

The Power To Guess The Unseen From The Seen, To Trace The Implications Of Things, To Judge The Whole Piece By The Pattern . . . This Cluster Of Gifts May Almost Be Said To Constitute Experience.

To Criticize Is To Appreciate, To Appropriate, To Take Intellectual Possession, To Establish In Fine A Relation With The Criticized Thing And To Make It One's Own.

The Power To Guess The Unseen From The Seen, To Trace The Implication Of Things, To Judge The Whole Piece By The Pattern, The Condition Of Feeling Life, In General, So Completely That You Are Well On Your Way To Knowing Any Particular Corner Of It-this Cluster Of Gifts May Almost Be Said To Constitute Experience, And They Occur In Country And In Town, And In The Most Differing Stages Of Education.

All Intimacies Are Based On Differences.