"Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon;
The little dog laughed to see such sport,
And the dish ran away with the spoon."


He said this was better than anything in Italian. They had Dante
and Tasso, and ever so many more great poets, but they had nothing
comparable to "Hey diddle diddle," nor had he been able to conceive
how any one could have written it. Did I know the author's name,
and had we given him a statue? On this I told him of the young lady
of Harrow who would go to church in a barrow, and plied him with
whatever rhyming nonsense I could call to mind, but it was no use;
all of these things had an element of reality that robbed them of
half their charm, whereas "Hey diddle diddle" had nothing in it that
could conceivably concern him.

So again it is with the things that gall us most. What is it that
rises up against us at odd times and smites us in the face again and
again for years after it has happened? That we spent all the best
years of our life in learning what we have found to be a swindle,
and to have been known to be a swindle by those who took money for
misleading us? That those on whom we most leaned most betrayed us?
That we have only come to feel our strength when there is little
strength left of any kind to feel? These things will hardly much
disturb a man of ordinary good temper. But that he should have said
this or that little unkind and wanton saying; that he should have
gone away from this or that hotel and given a shilling too little to
the waiter; that his clothes were shabby at such or such a garden-
party--these things gall us as a corn will sometimes do, though the