Page:Marie Corelli - the writer and the woman (IA mariecorelliwrit00coat).pdf/305

 whatever to this presentation. The omission caused considerable annoyance to the Committee of the Philosophical Institution, and the Secretary made inquiry as to why their special compliment to Miss Marie Corelli had been passed over. The reply was that they "did not think it was necessary to mention it"; a particularly lame and inadequate answer, seeing that if such a handsome presentation on the part of a great Institution had been made to any well-known male author, the probabilities are that considerable importance would have been attached to the incident. As it was, The Scotsman was judged to have committed itself to a singular error of prejudice in the omission, as also by stating that Miss Corelli's crowded audience at the Queen's Hall were "mostly women," a perfectly erroneous statement, as by far the larger half of the assembly was composed of the sterner sex.

Miss Corelli, in the course of the lecture referred to, attributed the gradual dwindling of Imagination to the feverish unrest and agitation of the age in which we live. The hurry-skurry of modern life, the morbid craving for incessant excitement, breed a disinclination to think. Where there is no time to think, there is less time to imagine; and when there is neither thought nor imagination, creative work of a high and lasting quality is not