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Elective English—IV

Notes Autobiography

The Boy I Left Behind Me (1946)

Quotations

“Professor Leacock has made more people laugh with the written word than any other
living author. One may say he is one of the greatest jesters, the greatest humorist of the
age.”
— A. P. Herbert
“Lord Ronald ... flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions.”
— Nonsense Novels, ”Gertrude the Governess”, 1911

“”He is still inimitable. No one, anywhere in the world, can reduce a thing to ridicule with
such few short strokes. He is the Grock of literature.”
— Evening Standard

“Hockey captures the essence of Canadian experience in the New World. In a land so
inescapably and inhospitably cold, hockey is the chance of life, and an affirmation that
despite the deathly chill of winter we are alive.”
Mr Leacock is as ‘bracing’ as the seaside place of John Hassall’s famous poster. His wisdom
is always humorous, and his humour is always wise.”

— Sunday Times
“I detest life-insurance agents: they always argue that I shall some day die, which is not
so.”

5.2 Are the Rich Happy? by Stephen Leacock

Let me admit at the outset that I write this essay without adequate material. I have never known,
I have never seen, any rich people. Very often I have thought that I had found them. But it turned
out that it was not so. They were not rich at all. They were quite poor. They were hard up. They
were pushed for money. They didn’t know where to turn for ten thousand dollars.

In all the cases that I have examined this same error has crept in. I had often imagined, from the
fact of people keeping fifteen servants, that they were rich. I had supposed that because a woman
rode down town in a limousine to buy a fifty-dollar hat, she must be well-to-do. Not at all. All
these people turn out on examination to be not rich. They are cramped. They say it themselves.
Pinched, I think is the word they use. When I see a glittering group of eight people in a stage box
at the opera, I know that they are all pinched. The fact that they ride home in a limousine has
nothing to do with it.

A friend of mine who has ten thousand dollars a year told me the other day with a sigh that he
found it quite impossible to keep up with the rich. On his income he couldn’t do it. A family that
I know who have twenty thousand a year have told me the same thing. They can’t keep up with
the rich. There is no use in trying. A man that I respect very much who has an income of fifty
thousand dollars a year from his law practice has told me with the greatest frankness that he
finds it absolutely impossible to keep up with the rich. He says it is better to face the brutal fact
of being poor. He says he can only give me a plain meal, what he calls a home dinner—it takes
three men and two women to serve it—and he begs me to put up with it.

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