looking on for the last time had been actuated
throughout his career by no motive but the desire to do that, and that
only, which would conduce to the honour and to the stability of the
country that gave him birth. Of him it might truly be said, as had
been said of another, 'That which he had to give, he gave.' (Loud and
prolonged applause.) His Lordship then pulled the cord, and the sheeting
rolled up into position...

Not, however, because those speeches will so edify and soothe me, nor
merely because those veiled statues will make less uncouth the city I
was born in, do I feverishly thrust on you my proposition. The wish in
me is that posterity shall be haunted by our dead heroes even as I am
by Umberto. Rather hard on posterity? Well, the prevision of its plight
would cheer me in mine immensely.

KOLNIYATSCH 1913.

None of us who keep an eye on the heavens of European literature can
forget the emotion that we felt when, but a few years since, the red
star of Kolniyatsch swam into our ken. As nobody can prove that I
wasn't, I claim now that I was the first to gauge the magnitude of
this star and to predict the ascendant course which it has in fact
triumphantly taken. That was in the days when Kolniyatsch was still
alive. His recent death gives the cue for the boom. Out of that boom
I, for one, will not be left. I rush to scrawl my name, large, on the
tombstone of Kolniyatsch.

These foreign fellows always are especially to be commended. By the mere
mention of their names you evoke in reader or hearer a vague sense of
your superiority and his. Thank heaven, we are no longer insular. I
don't say we have no native talent. We have heaps of it, pyramids of it,
all around. But where, for the genuine thrill, would England be but
for her good fortune in being able to draw on a seemingly inexhaustible
supply of anguished souls from the Continent--infantile wide-eyed
Slavs, Titan Teutons, greatly blighted Scandinavians, all of them
different, but all of them raving in one common darkness and with one
common gesture plucking out their vitals for exportation? There is no
doubt that our continuous receipt of this commodity has had a bracing
effect on our national character. We used to be rather phlegmatic, used
we not? We have learnt to be vibrant.

Of Kolniyatsch, as of all authentic master-spirits in literature, it is
true that he must be judged rather by what he wrote than by what he was.
But the quality of his ge