Page:Diary of a Pilgrimage (1891).pdf/302

 time. "Dear, dear me!" he says to himself, "why, in the time the man must have taken to paint this picture or to write this book, he might have blacked fifteen thousand pairs of boots, or have carried fifteen thousand hods of mortar up a ladder. This is how the time of the world is lost!"

It never occurs to him that, but for that picture or book, the artist would, in all probability, have been mouching about with a pipe in his mouth, getting into trouble.

It reminds me of the way people used to talk to me when I was a boy. I would be sitting, as good as gold, reading The Pirate's Lair, when some cultured relative would look over my shoulder and say: "Bah! what are you wasting your time with that rubbish for? Why don't you go and do something useful?" and would take the book away from me. Upon which I would get up, and go out to "do something useful;" and would come home an hour afterwards, looking like a bit out of a battle picture, having tumbled through the roof of Farmer Bates's greenhouse and killed a cactus, though totally unable to explain how I came to be on the roof of Farmer Bates's greenhouse. They had much better have left me alone, lost in The Pirate's Lair!

The artists in this land of which I dreamt left off painting pictures, after hearing what the critics said, and purchased ladders, and went off and painted houses.

Because, you see, this country of which I dreamt was not one of those vulgar, ordinary countries, such as exist in the waking world, where people let the critics talk as much as ever they like, and nobody pays the slightest attention to what they say. Here, in this strange