you please. They think you know and they will not have yet caught you
lying often enough to suspect that you are not the unworldly and
scrupulously truthful person which you represent yourself to be; nor yet
will they know how great a coward you are, nor how soon you will run
away, if they fight you with persistency and judgement. You keep the
dice and throw them both for your children and yourself. Load them then,
for you can easily manage to stop your children from examining them. Tell
them how singularly indulgent you are; insist on the incalculable benefit
you conferred upon them, firstly in bringing them into the world at all,
but more particularly in bringing them into it as your own children
rather than anyone else's. Say that you have their highest interests at
stake whenever you are out of temper and wish to make yourself unpleasant
by way of balm to your soul. Harp much upon these highest interests.
Feed them spiritually upon such brimstone and treacle as the late Bishop
of Winchester's Sunday stories. You hold all the trump cards, or if you
do not you can filch them; if you play them with anything like judgement
you will find yourselves heads of happy, united, God-fearing families,
even as did my old friend Mr Pontifex. True, your children will probably
find out all about it some day, but not until too late to be of much
service to them or inconvenience to yourself.

Some satirists have complained of life inasmuch as all the pleasures
belong to the fore part of it and we must see them dwindle till we are
left, it may be, with the miseries of a decrepit old age.

To me it seems that youth is like spring, an overpraised
season--delightful if it happen to be a favoured one, but in practice
very rarely favoured and more remarkable, as a general rule, for biting
east winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and what
we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits. Fontenelle at the age of