GRAVEYARD SCANDAL

There is a scandal sheet for the book-reading public as well as for the shop girls and mechanics who entertain themselves on the Sabbath with the misadventures of financiers and stage beauties. Consequently, not a year passes without a tremendous sale for some book on the private affairs of the great and near great, written by a person who is blatantly on the inside of everything, and can entertain the curious with bons mots and moth-eaten scandal for four hundred pages. The Greville Memoirs (unexpurgated--think of it!) are shortly to be published in this country; and the juicier bits about Queen Victoria, Lord Byron, the late Edward VII, and Disraeli will be aired to the great satisfaction of publishers and readers alike.

The ordinary person, whether in this country, or Great Britain, can gossip authentically only about the mediocre people he knows; and, while it is enjoyable, his soul yearns for something more aristocratic. This thirst after coronets has been the cause of Mr. Michael Ariens present prosperity. And, for that matter, he did well enough with imaginary peers and Honorables; but the real inside story of genuine dukes and prime ministers leaves such vapid tales absolutely nowhere. Even the "gentleman with a duster" and Margot Asquith have not sated the public's taste for what the Duke of Devonshire said when his hounds caught distemper.

The readers of the Sunday supplement are frankly curious. They will read about stock brokers and the King of Spain with equal avidity. It never occurs to more sophisticated and less candid people that memoirs of a certain type are only scandal sheets, bound between covers, and, by no possible logical circumvention, in any better taste. It would be preferable to let the dead rest with whatever reputation they managed to carry away with them; for, according to such books, they had more than enough trouble for their lot while alive.