esse; speaking low
and sweet and thick, with a touch of burr; telling strange tales with
singular deliberation and, to a patient listener, excellent effect.
After all these ups and downs, he seemed still, like the rich student
that he was of yore, to breathe of money; seemed still perfectly sure
of himself and certain of his end. Yet he was then upon the brink of
his last overthrow. He had set himself to found the strangest thing in
our society: one of those periodical sheets from which men suppose
themselves to learn opinions; in which young gentlemen from the
universities are encouraged, at so much a line, to garble facts,
insult foreign nations and calumniate private individuals; and which
are now the source of glory, so that if a man's name be often enough
printed there, he becomes a kind of demigod; and people will pardon
him when he talks back and forth, as they do for Mr. Gladstone; and
crowd him to suffocation on railway platforms, as they did the other
day to General Boulanger; and buy his literary works, as I hope you
have just done for me. Our fathers, when they were upon some great
enterprise, would sacrifice a life; building, it may be, a favourite
slave into the foundations of their palace. It was with his own life
that my companion disarmed the envy of the gods. He fought his paper
single-handed; trusting no one, for he was something of a cynic; up
early and down late, for he was nothing of a sluggard; daily
earwigging influential men, for he was a master of ingratiation. In
that slender and silken fellow there must have been a rare vein of
courage, that he should thus have died at his employment; and
doubtless ambition spoke loudly in his ear, and doubtless love also,
for it seems there was a marriage in his view had he succeeded. But he
died, and his paper died after him; and of all this grace, and tact,
and courage, it must seem to our blind eyes as if there had come
literally nothing.

These three students sat, as I was saying, in the corridor, under the
mural tablet that records the virtues of Machean, the former
secretary. We would often smile at that ineloquent memorial, and
thought it a poor thing to come into the world at all and leave no
more behind one than Machean. And yet of these three, two are gone and
have left less; and this book, perhaps, when it is old and foxy, and
some one picks it up in a corner of a book-shop, and glances through
it, smiling at the old, graceless turns of speech, a