The Equinox (Volume I, Number IV)

THE EQUINOX that he must be responsible for some of the oysters in the stew. And where was Sidney Blow? Yes: it’s a silly book; a book elaborately and deliberately silly; even laboriously silly with that silliness which cometh not forth but by prayer and fasting. ... And as I continued to read, it grew monotonously silly. Paul “slipped into the Crack” in several different ways, but there wasn’t much difference in the result. I began to wonder if Mr. Blackwood has been drinking from the wisdom- fount of Ecclesiastes and Don Juan! And oh dear! the conversations. Children don’t talk bad metaphysics, nor do repatriated lumbermen. But Mr. Blackwood must dree his weird, I suppose. And then, on a sudden, the monotony breaks up into a mixture of “La Morte Amoureuse,” “Thomas Lake Harris,” “The Yoke” (Mr. Hubert Wales’ master- piece), and “The Autobiography of a Flea told in a Hop, Skip, and a Jump.” But I prefer Mr. Verbouc to Uncle Paul, and Bella to Nixie. From the point of view of pure literature, of course. The book then slobbers off into Gentle-Darwin-meek-and-mild Theosophy. Victoria at last, thank God! I think I’ll slip into the Crack, myself! ALEISTER CROWLEY. THE LITERARY GUIDE. Messrs. Watts and Co, 2d The Journeyings of Joseph. Joseph has gone a-wandering; and, as he cannot even on the billowy waves keep his mouth shut, we are treated in the above official organ to an account of his itinerary as if he were the real original Vasco de Gama. He reminds us rather of the Shoreditch lady who went for her first country walk, as an old song tells us: “T’ve been roaming, I’ve been roaming Where the meadow dew is sweet; And I’m coming, and I’m coming With its pearls upon my feet.” For, if he brings back with him “cockle shells from distant lands” like a certain Roman Caesar, akin to the information which now gushes from his lips, his pearls will indeed be from the land of Gophir, and must I am afraid be trampled by us with other flash fudge: Parisian ware back into the gutter whence they came, the gutter of phylogenic-ontogeny. There was no other Joseph or Josephina aboard, no “helpmeet” worthy of Him, all Potiphar’s wives—by the way, a Second Joseph would have been rather a tall order for either Mrs, Potiphar or Ernst Haeckel—so the Great and Only 332