correspondent describes as 'the irresponsible ruffian element' may be
known by their various religious designations only within very
restricted areas.

Well, the Chinese have given it up, poor fellows! and are asking the
Christians--as to-day's newspapers inform us--to pray for them. Do you
wonder? But that is, or was, the Chinese 'viewpoint,'--and what a
willow-pattern viewpoint! Observe its delicacy. It does not venture to
interest or be interesting; merely 'to be not without interest.' But it
does 'venture to illustrate incidents'--which, for a viewpoint, is brave
enough: and this illustration 'is suggestive of something more than an
academic attempt to explain an unpleasant aspect of things which, if
allowed to materialise, might suddenly culminate.' What materialises? The
unpleasant aspect? or the things? Grammar says the 'things,' 'things
which if allowed to materialise.' But things are materialised already,
and as a condition of their being things. It must be the aspect, then,
that materialises. But, if so, it is also the aspect that culminates, and
an aspect, however unpleasant, can hardly do that, or at worst cannot
culminate in anything resembling the Chang-Sha riots.... I give it up.

Let us turn to another trick of Jargon: the trick of Elegant Variation,
so rampant in the Sporting Press that there, without needing to attend
these lectures, the Undergraduate detects it for laughter:--

Hayward and C. B. Fry now faced the bowling; which apparently had
no terrors for the Surrey crack. The old Oxonian, however,
took some time in settling to work....

Yes, you all recognise it and laugh at it. But why do you practise it in
your Essays? An undergraduate brings me an essay on Byron. In an essay on