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Conversely, a very large number of things that do happen in real life and are interesting never seem to get into novels. For instance, repetitions. Your hero will fall off a horse and break something, but he does not do it twenty times as he would if he were a living being. A man comes late to dinner, but he is not always coming late to dinner as he would if he were human: and, what is worse, a score of highly interesting real types never get between covers at all.

Take, for instance, that immoderately common type, among the most common of God's creatures, which I will call "the Silent Fool," the man who hardly ever talks, and when he does says something so overwhelmingly silly that one remembers it all one's life. I can recollect but one Silent Fool in modern letters, but he comes in a book which is one of the half-dozen immortal achievements of our time, a book like a decisive battle, or like the statue of John the Baptist at South Kensington, a glory for us all. I mean The Diary of a Nobody. In that you will find the silent Mr. Padge, who says "That's right"—and nothing more.