ROBBER

n : A candid man of affairs. It.is related of Voltaire that one night he and some traveling companions lodged at a wayside inn. The surroundings were suggestive, and after supper they agreed to tell robber stories in turn. When Voltaire’s turn came he said: “Once there was a Farmer-General of the Revenues.” Saying nothing more, he was encouraged to continue. “That,” he said, “is the story.” ROMANCE, n. Fiction that owes no allegiance to the God of Things as They Are. In the novel the writer’s thought is tethered to probability, as a domestic horse to the hitching-post, but in romance it ranges at will over the entire region of the imagination— free, lawle , immune to bit and rein. Your novelist is a poor creature, as Carlyle might Say—a mere reporter. He may invent his characters and plot, but he must not imagine anything taking place that might not occur, albeit his entire narrative is candidly a lie. Why he imposes this hard condition on himself, and “drags at each remove a lengthening chain” of his own forging he can explain in ten thick volumes without illuminating by so much as a candle’s ray the black profound of his own ignorance of the matter. There are great novels, for great writers have “laid waste their powers” to write them, but it remains true that far and away the most fascinating fiction that we have is “The You sand and One Nights.” ROPE, n. An obsolescent appliance for reminding a a ins that they too are mortal. Itis put about the neck and remains in place one’s whole life long. It has been largely superseded by a more complex electrical device worn upon another part of the person; and this is rapidly giving place to an apparatus known as the preachment. ROSTRUM, n. In Latin, the beak of a bird or the prow of a ship. In America, a place from which a candidate for office energetically expounds the wisdom, power of the rabble. virtue and 304