Page:Diary of a Pilgrimage (1891).pdf/255

 of the word; not great like the greatest men—the men who do not know that they are great—but decidedly great, according to the practical standard. When he wrote a book, a hundred thousand copies would be sold during the first week; and when a play of his was produced, the theatre was crammed for five hundred nights. And of each new work it was said that it was more clever and grand and glorious than were even the works he had written before.

Wherever the English language was spoken, his name was an honoured household word. Wherever he went, he was fêted and lionised and cheered. Descriptions of his charming house, of his charming sayings and doings, of his charming self, were in every newspaper.

Shakespeare was not one-half so famous in his day as is in his.

Fortunately, he happened to be still in town; and on being ushered into his sumptuously-furnished study, I found him sitting before one of the windows, smoking an after-dinner cigar.

He offered me one from the same box. 's cigars are not to be refused. I know he pays half-a-crown a-piece for them by the hundred; so I accepted, lit up, and, sitting down opposite to him, told him my trouble.

He did not answer immediately after I had finished; and I was just beginning to think that he could not have been listening, when—with his eyes looking out through the open window to where, beyond the smoky city, it seemed as if the sun, in passing through, had left the gates of the sky ajar behind him—he took his cigar from his lips, and said:

"Do you want a real pathetic story? I can tell you you do. It is not very long, but it is sad enough,"