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remain in so charming a refuge as my bed? DidMilton’s daughters ask him if he was ill when he preferred to dictate from his bed? Was Dr. Johnson ill? Were the French Kings? No, I am not ill; I am merely philoclinic … that is my answer, if I can but make it to her who arrives to clean my flat.…

Believing
    Yes, I believe everything; you cannot tell me anything that I cannot believe.
    That the forbidden fruit of Paradise was an apple presents no difficulties to me; nor that mermaids sing when combing their hair and swans when dying, that ostriches eat keys and a whale ate Jonah, that a remora can stay a ship, and the cockatrice, who is hatched by a toad out of the egg of a cock, slay a man by a glance.
    All the reputed strange habits of birds and beasts I believe, even that little birds tell tales, unicorns love virgins, dragons are the faithfullest of pets, wild horses the most inquisitive, and yet the most uninformed, of quadrupeds, who still stick at nothing to drag secrets from people, but always drag in vain.
    I believe (can you?) that
    Slow
Boötes
underneath him sees
    In th’icy
Isles,
those Goslings hatcht of Trees;
    Whose fruitfull leaves, falling into the Water
,
    Are turn’d (they say) to living Fowls soon after;
    and that
    Rotten sides of broken Ships do change
    To Barnacles; O Transformation strange!
    â€™Twas first a green Tree, then a gallant Hull
,
    Lately a Mushroom, now a flying Gull
.
    And I believe in dowsing, and that anyone can divine water anywhere, whether it is there or not.
    I believe in the Athanasian Trinity, and in angels; angels in heaven, on earth, and in the midmost air; angels with flaming swords expelling our parents from Paradise and obstructing Balaam’s ass; French angels assisting the Allied armies at Mons and turning back General Von Kluck’s march on Paris; Ulster angels crowding about Derry; Thomist angels crowding on needles; weeping angels distressed at what they see; guardian or tutelary angels steering our wayward course.
    I believe that most things move the underjaw when eating, the crocodile not; that sirloins were knighted by an English king; that Diogenes lived in a tub, St. Simon Stylites on a pillar, chameleons on air, salamanders in fire, mermen in the sea; that corpses bleed when their murderer approaches; that what I read in the newspapers is true.
    I can be every man’s gull, and am infinitely persuadable. For to believe greatly is to enlarge life’s oddity; to teratologize and credit strange relations, to run open-mouthed after aniles, or old wives’ tales, illustrates the world with coloured candles, whose queer and flickering flames quaver into dim hidden corners, suggesting the goblin tenebrios that lurk therein, defining little but denying nothing. The clear and garishlucence of the sceptical spirit I utterly reject: it is so dull.
    And there is nothing left remarkable
    Beneath the visiting moon
. …
    That is what it ends in.
    Give me a loud lie. Give me “misse-stories, hisse stories, by the old Serpent hissed and buzzed among superstitious men”; give me “that babbling and fabling Abdias,” who can tell me Ethiopian fables, and entertain me “in a fools’ Paradise situate above the highest mountains, with such delicacies as shew that Adam’s children are still in love with the forbidden fruit.”
    I promise you I will swallow all you give me, I will reject nothing, I will not strain at gnats, no, nor at camels neither. He over there, you say he is a werewolf, and prowls howling by night over Primrose Hill? I can well believe it; he has that air. That other, he is a spy for the Russian government, and that is where he gets all his money from. He instigates strikes; his pockets bulge with Russian gold. There are some Nazi spies here too; they track down and murder refugees. As for that group over there, they indulge in the wildest, the oddest debauches—you would scarcely believe if I