Free The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks by Robertson Davies

interest to the gloomy, immobile pan of the average Canadian citizen should be cherished and not extirpated with circular scissors.
• O F R EADING P LAYS •
    A SMALL PLAY-READING group of which I am one met last night and had a very good time with Goldsmith’s
She Stoops To Conquer
. Reading plays can be anythingfrom the pleasantest to the most penitential of pastimes. I was reading in Thomas Davies’
Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick, Esq.
a few days ago about one of King George the Second’s exploits in this direction. The King had reached the age of seventy-seven and had ceased to go to the theatre, but he was keen to hear Macklin’s farce
Love à la Mode
, and Macklin had some hope that he might be asked to read his play to the King—presumably acting it out with great spirit. But, as Davies tells us,
Love à la Mode
was read to his Majesty by an old Hanoverian gentleman, who spent eleven weeks in the misrepresentation of the author’s meaning; the German was totally void of humour and was, besides, not well acquainted with the English language; the King, however, expressed great satisfaction at the Irishman’s getting the better of his rivals, and gaining the young lady. I have myself been present at play readings which were not much livelier than this.
• O F S ELF -H EALING •
    I WAS PLAYING some gramophone records last night, and one of them stuck in a groove, and before I could reach it, played the same passage at least ten times. I can remember the days when this happened quite often, and records with two or three such faults in them were prized. The owners would put them on again and again and howl delightedly when the repeats came. I recall one man who had a Harry Lauder record which did this at three separate points, and he never tired of it. But some of his friends did.… I visited my doctor, who has been gazing into the crystal ball and informs me that I have strabismus of the epithalamium, and must undergo treatment for it. I passed a window on the way home which contained packages of Fowl Conditioner, and the wild thought struck me that Imight cure myself with that, making a name for myself in the medical histories.
• O F B ONES •
    D RIVING NEAR a railway siding this morning I beheld a sight of grim beauty—a gondola loaded with bones on their way to a glue factory. The load was heaped high and the rib-cages, spines and skulls of horses and cattle were seen in silhouette against a winter sky. Skeletons of all kinds have a beauty of their own; to me a house half-built, or a tall building which is still in the steel-structure stage, is a more pleasing object than the same building completed. Why skeletons are considered frightening objects I have no idea; most people would be far handsomer without their flesh than with it and I think this holds true of animals, as well.… And yet I will admit that there was an air of austerity about this load for the bone-yard. It was a gigantic reminder of our mortality, and if Sir Thomas Browne had been riding in the car with me he would no doubt have favoured me with a few rolling periods on the subject. And although the bones in themselves were beautiful there was something depressing about the thought that they would end, in all probability, as ten-cent bottles of mucilage, and that vile substance which bookbinders use so freely in their trade.
• T HE L ANGOURS OF T RAVEL •
    A S I SAT ON A siding today I reflected upon the extraordinary slowness of our Canadian trains. There are, I know, fast trains in this country, but they never go anywhere that I want to go. The trains which I am forced to take dawdle through the countryside, squatting every now and then to cool their bellies in the snow,while I yawn and try to read, a diversion which the lumpiness of the roadbed makes impossible. I was roused from a doze this afternoon by a fear that the train was on fire. There was no smoke, and I decided that someone must have left a pair of rubbers, or