31 AUGUST 1951, Page 17

That Lily

SIR,—If you and I want to gild a lily I cannot see why William Shakespeare or Sir Norman Birkett need interfere. English is a free language. For my part 1 consider lilies merely painted to be insipid in the extreme. The Goldsmiths' Company would make a far better job of it than the Worshipful Company of Painter-Stainers. I envisaged Walter Taplin's "awful moralisings " as a white lily (deathly white) embossed in gilt letters, like a Lyons tea shop, bearing the legend which I correctly designated a saw.—Yours faithfully, C. H. BUTLER.

Crawley Rectory, Sussex.