the only honest method of quotation is plagiary. If you cannot plagiarise surely it were better not to quote.
ON THE ART OF STAYING AT THE
SEASIDE
A MEDITATION AT EASTBOURNE
To stay at the seaside properly, one should not think. But even in staying at the seaside there are intervals, waking moments when meals come, even if there are no appointed meal-times. Moreover, now and then one must go to buy tobacco, a matter one can trust to no hireling lest he get it dry. It cannot be always seaside, even as it cannot be always May, and through the gaps thought creeps in. Going over the cliff and along the parade, and down by the circulating library to the cigar divan where they sell Perique tobacco, the swinging of one's legs seems to act like a pendulum to the clockwork of one's brain. One meditates all the way, and chiefly on how few people there are who can really—to a critical adept—be said to stay at the seaside.
People seem to think that one can take a ticket to Eastbourne or Bognor or Ventnor, and come and stay at the seaside straight away, just as I have known new-hatched undergraduates tell people they were going to play billiards. Thousands and thousands of people think they have stayed at the seaside, and have not, just as thousands of people erroneously imagine they have played whist. For the latter have played not whist but Bumblepuppy, and the former
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