In this new world, one afternoon, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, standing in front of his easel, remarked to all present whom it should concern, that The Shaving of Shagpat was a book which Shakespeare might have been glad to write.

For Tom, lazy and indolent as he was, shaved with the unfailing regularity of a man to whom shaving has become an instinct.

Hence even of Mr. George Meredith's fiction I make no effort to possess first editions; yet The Shaving of Shagpat is an exception.

His shaving, always disagreeable, sometimes painful, was a joyous little labour on this day.