Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/60

 had been a brilliant and promising fellow. His parodies and his verse had appeared in the Yellow Book alongside the work of other men whose promise had been fulfilled. People had taken him up and asked him about—him, the son of humble parents, educated at Oxford by his uncle who made a fortune as a ship chandler. Critics wrote of him that "he struck a new note," et cetera, et cetera. He had been one of the literary radicals of his day. And then suddenly something had happened and people grew tired of him. No one wrote of him any longer. The fashions changed and his sort of thing was no longer wanted. The Yellow Book died. And now all the parodies and verse lay encased, forgotten and dusty, in copies of a periodical filed away in dusty museums. It was a curiosity. It all dated now. Nobody wanted that kind of thing. It dated. It was older than the writing of the Venerable Bede.

In all the symphony of literature he had been able only to harp on one string and long ago that string had grown flat and monotonous from too much use.

Now for fifteen years he had been writing items about the English who lived in Italy and about those fashionable and gaudy creatures like the d'Orobelli and Father d'Astier who passed through Florence on their way from Rome to Paris or Rome to Venice. He knew them not. He only wrote what filtered down from their world into the duller circles which he frequented. Sometimes he wrote querulous book reviews, mostly of travel books written about Italy, and these, too, appeared in the