ter'd Square'--that
line came back to me on my lonely beat, and with it the whole stanza,
ringing in my brain and bearing in on me how tragically different from
the happy scene imagined by him was the poet's actual experience of that
prince in whom of all princes we should put not our trust.

But--strange how the mind of an essayist, be it never so stricken, roves
and ranges!--I remember pausing before a wide doorstep and wondering if
perchance it was on this very one that the young De Quincey lay ill and
faint while poor Ann flew as fast as her feet would carry her to Oxford
Street, the 'stony-hearted stepmother' of them both, and came back
bearing that 'glass of port wine and spices' but for which he might, so
he thought, actually have died. Was this the very doorstep that the old
De Quincey used to revisit in homage? I pondered Ann's fate, the cause
of her sudden vanishing from the ken of her boy-friend; and presently I
blamed myself for letting the past over-ride the present. Poor vanished
Soames!

And for myself, too, I began to be troubled. What had I better do? Would
there be a hue and cry--Mysterious Disappearance of an Author, and all
that? He had last been seen lunching and dining in my company. Hadn't I
better get a hansom and drive straight to Scotland Yard?... They would
think I was a lunatic. After all, I reassured myself, London was a
very large place, and one very dim figure might easily drop out of it
unobserved--now especially, in the blinding glare of the near Jubilee.
Better say nothing at all, I thought.

And I was right. Soames' disappearance made no stir at all. He was
utterly forgotten before any one, so far as I am aware, noticed that he
was no longer hanging around. Now and again some poet or prosaist may
have said to another, 'What has become of that man Soames?' but I never
heard any such question asked. The solicitor through whom he was paid
his annuity may be presumed to have made inquiries, but no echo of
these resounded. There was something rather ghastly to me in the general
unconsciousness that Soames had existed, and more than once I caught
myself wondering whether Nupton, that babe unborn, were going to be
right in thinking him a figment of my brain.

In that extract from Nupton's repulsive book there is one point which
perhaps puzzles you. How is it that the author, though I have here
mentioned him by name and have quoted the exact words he is going to
write, is not going to gras