s he, indeed, of fame, that, when he
retired to ease and plenty, while he was yet little declined into the
vale of years, and before he could be disgusted with fatigue or
disabled by infirmity, he desired only that in this rural quiet he who
had so long mazed his imagination by following phantoms might at last
be cured of his delirious ecstasies, and as a hermit might estimate the
transactions of the world._"

Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have's my own,
Which is most faint.

Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant;
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so, that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults.

As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.--_Epilogue to The Tempest_.

He was hoping, while his fingers drummed in unison with the beat of his
verse, that this last play at least would rouse enthusiasm in the pit.
The welcome given its immediate predecessors had undeniably been tepid.
A memorandum at his elbow of the receipts at the Globe for the last
quarter showed this with disastrous bluntness; and, after all, in 1609
a shareholder in a theater, when writing dramas for production there,
was ordinarily subject to more claims than those of his ideals.

He sat in a neglected garden whose growth was in reversion to primal
habits. The season was September, the sky a uniform and temperate
blue. A peachtree, laden past its strength with fruitage, made about
him with its boughs a sort of tent. The grass around his writing-table
was largely hidden by long, crinkled peach leaves--some brown and
others gray as yet--and was dotted with a host of brightly-colored
peaches. Fidgeting bees and flies were excavating the decayed spots in
this wasting fruit, from which emanated a vinous odor. The bees hummed
drowsily, their industry facilitating idleness in others. It was
curious--he meditated, his thoughts straying from "an uninhabited
island"--how these insects alternated in color between brown velvet and
silver, as they blundered about a flickering tessellation of amber and
dark green . . . in search of rottenness. . . .

He frowned. Here was an arid forenoon as imagination went. A seasoned
plagiarist by this, he opened a book which lay upon the table among
several others and duly found the chapter entitled _Of the Cannibals_.

"So, so!" he s