Page:Et Cetera, a Collector's Scrap-Book (1924).djvu/42

 This is a period when it is very good to be young, and so I willingly sympathize with the madness of my friend Florizel, who drives about London looking for his lost youth in a taximeter filled with children and chocolates. There are moments, he tells me when this annual search seems to be crowned with success. Perhaps for an hour he recovers the forgotten ignorance of his early years; the children treat him with the genial rudeness of comradeship; he is patronised by ticket-collectors and policemen. But he goes home an old man. No less do I sympathise with the youthful and agreeable Hamlet, who staggers along the Charing Cross Road at this season with his arms and pockets filled with books. These are not, alas! the spoils of a conqueror, but the sacrifices of the vanquished, for every spring Hamlet falls in love, and madly sells his books for flowers and art jewelry. His dreamgirls are always of the practical kind, and their affection for Hamlet appears to pass with his library; but Hamlet loves the spring nevertheless. So too, I suppose, does Pericles, whose madness, however, fills me rather with envy than with sympathy, for to him the spring brings a passion for work that enables him to squander the summer hours at Lord’s or the Oval like a capitalist. There is something immoral in being able to perform prodigies of work when all the world is stretching from its winter sleep. But so it is with Pericles, and his