PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS
Oh Lord! Thou kens what zeal I bear,
When drinkers drink, and swearers swear,
And singing there, and dancing here,
Wi’ great and sma’;
For I am keepit by thy fear,
Free frae them a’.
BURNS: “Holy Willie’s Prayer.”
When I was a small boy I liked above all things the stories about
Pharisees and Publicans. Pharisees, I think, were connoted in my mind
with schoolmasters. Publicans, on the other hand, were a mysterious,
jovial people given to gluttony and wine-bibbing. The latter I knew
nothing about, but the gluttony I forgave. I remember a pang of
disappointment when I discovered in older years that Publicans were
connected with the Inland Revenue.
In China I believe nearly all morals are imparted by means of fables,
and it is the story-telling department of our early teaching that
leaves us with something tangible which we can use in after life as a
bobbin whereon to wind the weft of our own thoughts. And this
distinction of Pharisee and Publican remains with me so far a reality
as to stand for something which the words themselves of course do not
mean. They are convenient symbols for the class who want mankind to
walk along the path of mechanical obedience, and the class who are out
to realise the best the world can give; the class who condemn
themselves and their fellow-creatures as miserable sinners, and the
class who not only love to be merry and wise, but are ready to sink a
certain amount of wisdom in the interests of merriment. William
Fisher, of Mauchline, was a typical Pharisee, and Robert Burns, who
immortalised him, was the greatest of the Publicans.
And though I agree that there is no historical fitness in my use of
the term Publican, I think the Pharisee is a continuing social type
and probably as eternal as the hills themselves. That is to say, it
will require some new geological period to shake him off the earth,
and he will not depart until he can no longer be of service to the
world. For my more recent reading about the Pharisee has led me to
modify my childish imaginings. To-day I have a great respect for the
Pharisee. I have learned that with all his faults he was a very
respectable, classy Israelite. He knew that he was set apart from the
common herd, and he was proud to be an abstainer and ascetic, as if
these things were good in themselves. His ideal of life was to have a
lot of meddling, fussy laws of outward conduct, and not only to obey
them scrupulously himself, but to persecute others who did not. Not an
amiable character, perhaps, but at least sincere and honest. Moreover,
he knew no better. Whether there was the same excuse for the Pharisee
of Manchester in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and ninety is a
doubtful point.
Not that I would like to see――or am likely to see――a city bereft of
Pharisees. A few to sanctify and give general tone and outward
respectability are as necessary to Manchester as lace curtains to a
suburban villa. My grumble is that in Manchester there are too many
Pharisees to the square yard. They capture and run organisations that
were made for better things. They make it impossible for the average
wicked citizen to take part in their good works, they bring disrepute
upon the city by their vagaries on the house-tops, and they rouse up a
great deal of hatred, malice, and uncharitableness in fighting with
great ability and vehemence against the right of the harmless,
necessary citizen to amuse himself in his harmless, necessary way.
Many will remember an historic quarrel between two old friends who
were engaged in very doubtful municipal transactions, and how they
made it up in a Wesleyan chapel, and one put £50 in the plate as a
token of regret for having uttered naughty words about the other. By
the more respectable class of Manchester that action was regarded as
being a natural and right expression of apology. If it was earnest and
sincere it had a folk-lore resemblance, I suppose, to the sacrifice,
or burnt offering. By the elect it was quoted as a very beautiful act
of retribution. To one like myself, outside the circle, it was not
perhaps actual evidence of conspiracy to commit fraud, but it was at
least a beacon light warning of a dangerous shore. I remember
prosecuting an embezzler at Lancaster who always prayed with his
victims before he took their money. Whalley, the famous Blackburn
solicitor, who swindled his hundreds, was a famous prayer-monger, and
in all those doubtful societies and associations which are so popular
in Lancashire, and through which the savings of the working class are
transferred to the pockets of their elders and betters, there is
generally a halo of holiness surrounding prominent members of the
board. And as long as popular opinion is in favour of the Pharisee,
and will invest in his business concerns because he is a Pharisee, so
long Manchester, with its simple, saving working class, is bound to
have more than her fair share of the race.
It has been a very interesting occupation with me during the last
twenty-five years to watch the constant dispute between the Pharisee
and the average citizen, and though the contest is by no means over
yet, I am glad to be able to chronicle that up to now the Pharisee is
several down. And that phrase reminds me of his attitude towards
Sunday golf. The Pharisee, of course, did not want to play golf on
Sunday, but a large majority of golfing citizens did, therefore it was
an evil thing to do, and they must be protected against themselves. At
one club where a meeting was held and feeling ran rather high, a
humorist moved as an amendment “That Sunday golf be not compulsory.”
The leading Pharisee――the sect have no sense of humour――protested
eloquently that no body of men could compel him to play golf. The
humorist drily pointed out to him that a careful reading of the
proposed rule would show that they did not intend to compel him. Then,
amidst laughter and cheers, it became a rule of the club, and, as far
as I know, it is a rule to this day.
What an excellent, sane rule it is. Your Pharisee is always compelling
you not to do this and not to do the other. What a calm, dignified way
of meeting him――to place on record the common law of the land that
Sunday golf is not compulsory. Of course, Sunday golf won all along
the line, one reason being that golf is a rich man’s amusement, and
that young Master Pharisee, when he was down from Oxford, would have a
round with his friends on Sunday afternoon, and that made the
governor’s position peculiarly ridiculous. But wait until the working
classes demand their outdoor amusements on the Sabbath, and you will
see a gathering of the sect worthy of Manchester in the palmiest days
of Pharisaism.
The fight over the Sunday papers had been fought and won before I came
to Manchester, but I remember a little skirmish started by Canon Nunn
in the form of a protest made against the boys shouting papers on
Sunday. Now, town noises are most people’s aversion, and if this had
been a real attack on unnecessary noise it would have been reasonable
enough. But it did not seek to stop Church bells or boys shouting
papers on Monday or Tuesday, and was really only an effort to
inconvenience those who preferred to read the sermons of Hubert by
their own fireside rather than to listen to the parsons in an
uncomfortable church. The Sunday paper is not, perhaps, the highest
ideal of journalism, but it is to many the only newspaper of their
week. It is to the discredit of the Pharisee that he has put every
obstacle in the way of the Sunday paper to prevent it from developing
into a bigger and more useful institution than it already is.
But one’s heart bleeds for the poor Pharisee when the theatre is
mentioned. I remember some Bolton Guardians passionately endeavouring
to hinder the little workhouse children from seeing a Christmas
pantomime. One asserted that theatres “brought ruin to thousands,” and
another that “he could not ask God’s blessing on a child whom he took
to the theatre.” Fortunately, there was a majority of sinners among
the Guardians, the holy men were defeated and the little children were
suffered to see the pantomime.
One of the wildest outbursts of fanaticism that I have ever witnessed
arose over the licensing of the Palace of Varieties. To anyone who had
lived in a healthier and more normal civilisation the affair seemed
impossible. For what was the situation? Manchester had a few
old-fashioned, out-of-date music-halls and a very large number of
singing-halls attached to public-houses――not the most desirable places
of entertainment. The directors of the Palace of Varieties proposed to
erect a large modern music-hall and give the best entertainment of
that kind that could be given. It was a London company, and, from a
business point of view, it made a mistake in not interesting
Manchester men in the company in a business sense. But there was no
doubt that such a hall was badly wanted by the general body of
citizens, and that the men who were going to run the show would never
allow any performance that the average Manchester citizen would not
like to see, just as his average London brother did. You would have
thought that any citizen of foresight would have welcomed such a
change. For years the magistrates and rulers of the city had provided
this class of entertainment in most undesirable places, and the
complacent Pharisee passed by on the other side; it did not come
between the wind and his nobility. But this “centre of vice,” as a
prominent Pharisee called it, was to be in the Oxford Road. It was to
be open and honest, and that was its offence. The Pharisee knew that
the Manchester citizens were evil people, that the music-hall was
going to be an evil thing, and, therefore, certain to be popular among
evil people, and so he opposed it with a vitality of strenuous abuse
that was the admiration of all who take pleasure in such
manifestations.
The earnestness of the crusade was beyond dispute, and the bed-rock
principle of it seemed to be a firm belief in original sin. The youth
of Manchester, as I gathered from letters of the protectors of morals,
is naturally evil and very prone to vice and immorality. Once it
strays from a Sunday school into a music-hall it directly takes to
excessive drinking and other immoralities and crime. The regime of the
Sunday school in no way renders the patient immune from these results.
In the interests of this hopeful class of youth, said the Pharisee,
the music-hall must be shut. The fact that there are a large number of
normal, healthy, young citizens who take no harm in music-halls was
overlooked. For weeks before the licence was applied for the
correspondence rolled on. Letters in favour of the Palace were
generally unsigned, as employees whose employers or directors were of
the ruling sect had to be cautious.
Nearly every church and chapel organisation went against the
improvement of music-hall performances. I remember one notable
exception. The Rev. W. S. Caiger, rector of St. Mark’s, had the pluck
to stand up against the overwhelming torrent of holiness that poured
through the newspapers. “Mr. Price-Hughes,” he wrote, “talked of the
wickedness of men who make a gain out of the exhibition of ballet
girls. A ballet girl who is fairly proficient in her profession is in
a far safer moral position than the young girls I watched the other
day making flannel shirts at tenpence the dozen.” That was a cap that
would have fitted more than one leading Pharisee, but the wearing of
it might have obscured his halo.
The legal history of the licence is not worth reporting. Licensing by
magistrates is not a very exact branch of scientific law. There was
the usual canvassing and peaceful picketing by the Pharisees and their
opponents. In the first round the former won, and one of their leaders
called for a “great meeting of united prayer and thanks to God for His
divine favour to our city.” I do not think this was held. There was
then a larger session. Gully applied, Sir John Harwood was in the
chair, and the licence was gained by 33 to 27. Thus on Whit-Monday,
1891, Manchester possessed a first-rate music-hall. Since then others
have been built and opened to the general benefit of weary citizens
who are fond of innocent amusement. And nowadays the Pharisees
sometimes patronise them, and so “all’s well that ends well.”
And the whole attitude of mind of the English Pharisee towards the inn
and the tavern is the most incomprehensible affair to the average
citizen. One would have thought that an endeavour would be made to
have the inn a place of cleanliness, beauty, and good repute, where
relaxation and bright amusement and music might be a God-send to
hard-working people. But generations of magistrates have decreed that
the workers are to have their drink surrounded by every discomfort.
Magnificent hotels and restaurants with music and dancing are only for
the rich. All this is, of course, done in the great cause of
temperance, and as Mr. Balfour said, “love of temperance is the polite
name for hatred of the publican.” In the upper and middle classes the
altered manners of the day in relation to strong drink are not due to
shutting down public-houses and degrading those that are left open.
Legislation is never likely to achieve any great moral reform, nor are
the licensing magistrates, as a rule, administrators of much sweetness
or great light.
Had they been so I think they would have noticed that in records of
English habits and English character the inn stands for nearly as much
as the church in the social life of the people. Those of us who have
plenty of house room do not quite recognise how an inn may be the one
possible meeting-place for friends in hours of recreation. How
shortsighted, then, to forbid its expansion, to make it uncomfortable
and degrading. In the literature of our country the inn is very rarely
spoken of with disrespect. It were easy to quote passage after
passage, from the holiest literature to the lightest, of the high
place that the inn and what it represents occupies in the minds of the
best Englishmen. Licensing magistrates should overhaul their Bibles
for the right references, and “when found, turn the leaf down.” Doctor
Johnson puts it in a phrase when he says: “No, sir; there is nothing
which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is
produced as by a good tavern or inn.” He then repeated with great
emotion Shenstone’s lines. The last verse is well remembered:
Whoe’er has travelled life’s dull round,
Where’er his stages may have been,
May sigh to think he still has found
The warmest welcome at an inn.
The spirit of freedom and social comfort that runs through all the
English writing about inns is a good thing to foster in itself. And in
whose interest is it suppressed? Not in the present-day interests of
the working man, but at the behest of the Pharisees, who have added a
commandment of their own, “Thou shalt not permit alcohol,” and who
believe that they can by associating drink with degradation and
discomfort put an end to its use. It was Charles Kingsley who solemnly
warned the teetotalers that they were “simply doing the devil’s work.”
As he said with much foresight and wisdom, “I dread the spirit of
teetotalism, because it will beget that subtlest of sins, spiritual
pride and Pharisaism. Its founders, like the first founders of every
ascetism may be, and as far as I have conversed with them are, pure,
humble, and self-denying men. So were the Fakeers, the first
Mohammedan ascetics, the first monks, the first Quakers … but after a
few generations the self-avenging Nemesis comes, the evil spirit drops
his mask and appears as Pharisaism.”
But if he could have lived to see the work of the licensing benches of
to-day, how they make it daily more impossible to run an inn or tavern
on right lines, bright, respectable, large, airy, and clean, with all
reasonable recreations for its patrons, Kingsley would have been able
to give the Evil One his due for the work of his adherents. Probably
the boldest and best solution of our difficulties would be Free Trade,
a high rateable value of premises and reasonable police supervision.
There could not, one would think, be a better field for practising
Free Trade principles――if you really believe in them――than in the
trade of our national beverage. It seems little less than a scandal
that new licences for experimental purposes are practically
unobtainable, and that the working classes are shut out of a fair
enjoyment of comfort and decency in tavern accommodation, whilst the
supply of luxuriously appointed hotels and restaurants for the upper
classes knows no bounds.
And there is another new sin that the Pharisee regards with peculiar
horror when it manifests itself among the working classes in any of
its popular forms――the sin of gambling. I remember when Bernard
Vaughan preached a sermon in Manchester to show that betting was not
in itself sinful, the whites of many Nonconformist eyes were turned
appealingly to heaven. Heaven gave no sign in the matter, and we may
take it the appeal was dismissed. For what can be sounder than the
Publican view of this and other matters, namely, that eating, drinking
and wagering are not in themselves sinful, but that the sin comes in
with the excess. Gluttony, drunkenness and gambling――if we use the
last word only in its expression of excess――those are the sins; and
even a Pharisee would not be too strict about eating, for something
like gluttony has ever been attendant upon the profession of piety.
For my part, so far from forbidding children to bet, I should teach
them how to do it prettily. A round game, say Pope Joan, played for
fish――the engraved mother-of-pearl variety for choice――at which
children learn to lose or win in a sweetly mannered and unselfish way
would always make, I think, a charming moral lesson. I remember my
father had strong views about the importance of everyone being taught
to bet――or gamble, if you prefer the word――in youth. My brother and I
had always to play whist against our parents for farthing
points――twopence a bumper――which had to be paid when we lost out of
our own pocket-money, and our fellow-gamblers exacted their winnings
to the uttermost farthing.
My father himself admitted that this was, for us, excessive gambling,
but then there were not in those days many serious financial calls
upon our means. I should not care to-day to risk so large a proportion
of my weekly income on the hazard of the card. But the point is that
if you learn to gamble for definite sums at definite games you can
easily content the wagering spirit that is within you without rushing
into excess. And think how well it would be if the schools and
Universities turned out lads capable of leading their fourth best.
Surely a man is a better citizen whose powers of observation have been
sufficiently developed to enable him to see a call for trumps, and is
not the eleven rule as near to the business of life as the rule in
Shelley’s case? At the University a good professor of whist might make
his chair self-supporting by playing with his pupils for very moderate
points. How few professors do that in classics, theology, or even the
sciences. The more the matter is gravely considered the clearer it is
that gambling requires educational stimulus rather than legislative
restraint. It wants the Publican’s treatment rather than the
Pharisee’s.
What a far better world it will be for the English workman when he is
invited to play his rubber in a neat restaurant after the manner of
the Belgian who orders his beer and his _jeu-de-bac_, and rattles the
dice with noisy merriment on the marble tables. Why should not the
municipality set up a sixpenny, or, if you will, a penny totalizer on
the racecourse, and abolish the yelling crowd of bookmakers, who by
some Pharisaical interpretation of the law are encouraged to carry on
their trade upon a racecourse because it is not a place within the
meaning of the Act?
What moves the Pharisee to roll in the dust and groan about gambling
is difficult to understand. For in every business transaction in life
there is an element of gambling. When the Chancellor of the Exchequer
promotes a great scheme of health insurance he invites his customers,
in the phrase of the ring, “to buy money,” and calls out the odds as
nine to four on the field. He knows the gambling instinct in mankind,
and very properly appeals to it. And, indeed, the gamble is
everywhere. Even in the County Court when you pay your hearing fee
there is the uncertainty of the law, and the betting is generally
against the defendant’s solvency, and you may never get even your
original stake out of the pool. What are the odds when the workman
buys his grocery or drapery on credit that he will get his money’s
worth?
I fear there is an element of jealousy in these sermons against
gambling. The preachers do not want the working man to gamble with the
bookmaker, but to put his money in some insurance or investing society
with prominent Pharisees on the board, calling out tempting odds in
specious advertisements which the Publican would be too honest to
offer. And if there is to be a statute against gambling, let us so
draft it and work it as not to kill trivial amusement, but to warn off
the course pious directors of fraudulent companies who in prayerful
tones commend their wild-cat gambles to the working man.
No, the truth is that gambling is to most of us an element of our
life, and, like all the other elements, should be used thankfully and
wisely, and not in excess. By all means follow Michael’s advice and
… well observe
The rule of――Not too much: by temperance taught,
In what thou eat’st and drink’st;
and, indeed, in all actions of life. But remember that the rule of
“Not too much” can never be exercised by a mere refusal to look the
facts of life in the face and run the risks of temptation.
I have preached that doctrine to many in Manchester, but I am bound to
say, without making many converts. I remember an amusing jest played
upon me at the Llandudno Golf Club. I had been laying down the true
rule about gambling, and no doubt preaching about it in a somewhat
Pharisaical tone, when a member of the committee asked me if I would
play a certain ex-mayor of a Midland borough who was making matches of
a very gambling and extravagant character with several of the younger
visitors.
“He will take it from you, Judge. You tell him firmly you are going to
have a ball on and nothing more; you can give him your views on
gambling, and don’t let him start off on the first tee with a
sovereign a hole, or anything of that sort.”
“Certainly not,” I said, “I’ll keep him within bounds.”
“You just talk to him like you’ve been talking to us,” said my friend.
“It will do him good. I’ll tell him you will play him at 10.30
to-morrow.”
The Pharisee within me was rampant, and I prepared to dress down the
ex-mayor and make him play his best for only half-a-crown.
At 10.30 he was on the tee, and I walked out to meet him. He looked a
short, thick-set, commonplace citizen with nothing of the gambler
about him. But appearances are often deceitful. After a few words of
greeting, I thought I would get to work, and said with some emphasis,
“I will play you for half-a-crown, sir, and not a penny more.”
He looked up astounded, and gasped out, “I beg your pardon, sir.”
“Half-a-crown,” I repeated, and to ease his disappointment I added, “I
don’t mind a shilling on the bye.”
“Sir!” he said, drawing himself up to what height he could and
speaking with scornful dignity, “This is a very unseemly joke. I have
never made a bet in my life, and I have a poor opinion, sir, of anyone
who wishes to make so fine a game as golf the subject of betting. I am
president of our Anti-Gambling League.”
With that he drove off a fine drive, and I topped the ball feebly into
the rough. From the club-house came the congratulatory laughter of
many Publicans at the discomfiture of the Pharisee.
It would be wrong indeed if I were to picture Manchester as a city
where the most eminent citizens were kill-joys, and where the men wore
broad phylacteries in their buttonholes when they went on ‘Change. On
the contrary, I speak of the Pharisees as merely a small but powerful
element in the community. For in no city were there more men of the
world who loved to do good with a merry heart and enjoy the give and
take of hospitality with their comrades and brother sinners.
Manchester men know how to work hard and play hard. They are early
risers, early closers, and early diners. If you were a stranger
wandering through the streets after 8 o’clock in the evening, you
would think you were in a deserted city; but put your head into the
Free Trade Hall, and it will be packed for a concert; ask for a seat
in one of the popular music-halls or a cinematograph show, and you may
not get one; you will even find people at the theatre――quite a throng
if it is a musical comedy――such a varied taste has Manchester in
entertainment.
But if you want a really delightful evening go and dine with one of
the societies or clubs whose annual dinner is being held at one of
Manchester’s best inns. It may be the Statistical Society or the
Playgoers Club or the Edinburgh Academicals, but it will not really
matter. For whether it be statistics or drama or scholarship, I can
promise you both fun and good fellowship. And I say this with honest
certainty, that there never was a more hospitable place than
Manchester, and there never were public dinners with less dulness and
boredom about them. I don’t know that the after-dinner speaking was
any better than it is in other places, but there was a jollity and
abandon about it difficult to convey in writing, though pleasant
enough to remember.
Sir John William Maclure was always a great figure at a banquet, both
literally and physically as well as socially, and ready enough he was
either to take a jest at his own expense in good part or to pink his
adversary with an epigram. I remember one excellent score he made off
myself. Maclure was the acknowledged impresario of the Tory party, and
was rather proud of the fact. He used to deny with mock-modest
emphasis that every appointment of recent years was made through his
influence. “But very nearly so!” he added. It was at a grand jury
dinner, where I sat next Sir Joseph Leese, the Recorder of Manchester,
and in proposing Sir William Maclure’s health I taunted him with the
discomfort he must feel on seeing Leese and myself present, and
knowing that we were the only two jobs in Lancashire with which he had
had nothing to do.
“Ah!” said the genial baronet as he finished his reply, “it is
correct, and it is a sad truth, no doubt greatly regretted in
Lancashire, that I had nothing to do with the appointment of the
present Recorder or the present County Court Judge. I have the
greatest respect for those two gentlemen, but I must correct his
Honour in one particular. He referred, no doubt in jest, to the two
appointments as two jobs. May I put him right? Sir Joseph Leese’s
appointment was not a job.”
In his more expansive humour, Sir John William was quite Falstaffian
in his addresses. I remember at a dinner given by a Society of
Accountants to which he had come from London, he expatiated on the
difficulties he had had in coming down at all. “I must tell you,
gentlemen, that Mr. Balfour said to me, ‘Sir John, it is impossible to
carry on the House if you leave us.’ ‘But, sir,’ I said, ‘I have to
dine with the Manchester accountants.’ ‘Ah,’ said Mr. Balfour, ‘then I
won’t keep you; but tell that excellent body from me how much I admire
them.’ (Great cheering.) But that is not all, gentlemen. In
Westminster Hall I met Lord Salisbury, and I had the greatest
difficulty to get away from him. He wanted me to come down to Hatfield
with him. I said, ‘What, my lord, and break my word to the Manchester
accountants?’ ‘No,’ said Lord Salisbury, ‘of course you mustn’t, but I
tell you what you must do; you must tell them from me that without
accountancy the nation would be ruined.’ (More cheering.) But,
gentlemen, it did not end there, for at the railway station I found
there was a special train just going to Sandringham. I was sent for,
and the Prince of Wales was gracious enough to request me to come down
and spend Sunday with him. ‘Sir,’ I said, ‘such a kind request is a
command, but I have promised to be with the Manchester accountants
to-night.’ ‘Not another word, Maclure,’ said the Prince. ‘Keep your
appointment, and tell the Manchester accountants that in my view they
are the backbone of the nation.’” (Long and continued cheering.)
Later in the evening a speaker of no particular account, who spoke in
a diffident, somewhat halting way, said he did not move in the select
circles that Sir John William Maclure did, “but,” he continued, “I
happen to know on the highest authority the regard in which he is held
by the greatest in the land. I was strolling in the gardens in Windsor
the other day, and a Scots servant in a kilt came up and asked me if I
came from Manchester. I said I did. ‘And do you know Sir John William
Maclure?’ ‘Very well,’ I replied. ‘Come with me then,’ he said, and he
led me into a beautiful drawing-room in the Palace, in which I found I
was in the presence of Royalty itself. After a courteous greeting I
was asked what I knew about Sir John William Maclure. I drew a noble
picture of all the virtues and attainments which endear him to
Manchester men. When I had finished, the gracious lady said, with a
sigh of relief: ‘You have taken a great load off my mind, for I was
not at all sure that he was a good companion for Albert Edward.’”
Fair play for Maclure, he enjoyed the chaff as much as anyone. And
that was one of the happy traits of after-dinner in Manchester――everyone
was there, like a schoolboy, to make fun or take fun in good part.
And, perhaps, the most admirable feature of the whole thing was that
even if there were reporters present, they were always clever enough
to pick out the sense of the speeches, and leave the wilder flights of
humour to the pleasures of memory.
Alas, John William’s jovial face smiles at us no longer, and too many
of the good fellows who were guests at the board are shadows of
memory. But fond as I was of the older days, and loyal as I am to the
memory of the older men, I am not going to praise yesterday at the
expense of to-day. I think the same right spirit of enjoyment still
holds good, and I hope it will always be true to say that no one will
find himself in touch with Manchester who cannot thoroughly enter into
that “joyous folly that unbends the mind,” which is Manchester’s habit
after dinner.