The Project Gutenberg EBook of Seven Men, by Max Beerbohm

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Title: Seven Men

Author: Max Beerbohm

Posting Date: September 15, 2008 [EBook #1306]
Release Date: May, 1998

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SEVEN MEN ***

Produced by Tom Weiss

SEVEN MEN

by Max Beerbohm

Transcriber's Note:
From the version of "Seven Men" published in 1919 by William
Heinemann (London). Two of the stories have been omitted
("James Pethel" and "A.V. Laider") since they are available
separately from Project Gutenberg.

In this plain ASCII version, emphasis and syllable
stress italics have been converted to capitals; foreign italics and accents
have been removed

In "Enoch Soames:"
I added a missing closing quotation mark in the following
phrase: 'Ten past two,' he said.

In "Hilary Maltby and Stephen Braxton:"
I changed the opening double quote to a single quote in:
'I wondered what old Mr. Abraham Hayward...
and
'I knew that if I leaned forward...

ENOCH SOAMES

When a book about the literature of the eighteen-nineties was given by
Mr. Holbrook Jackson to the world, I looked eagerly in the index for
SOAMES, ENOCH. I had feared he would not be there. He was not there.
But everybody else was. Many writers whom I had quite forgotten, or
remembered but faintly, lived again for me, they and their work, in Mr.
Holbrook Jackson's pages. The book was as thorough as it was brilliantly
written. And thus the omission found by me was an all the deadlier
record of poor Soames' failure to impress himself on his decade.

I daresay I am the only person who noticed the omission. Soames had
failed so piteously as all that! Nor is there a counterpoise in the
thought that if he had had some measure of success he might have passed,
like those others, out of my mind, to return only at the historian's
beck. It is true that had his gifts, such as they were, been
acknowledged in his life-time, he would never have made the bargain I
saw him make--that strange bargain whose results have kept him always in
the foreground of my memory. But it is from those very res