d eclipse some years ago: and I have been there in spirit for
these twenty lines past, under a vast gusty awning, now with twenty
thousand fellow-citizens looking on from the benches, now in the circus
itself, a grim gladiator with sword and net, or a meek martyr--was
I?--brought out to be gobbled up by the lions? or a huge, shaggy,
tawny lion myself, on whom the dogs were going to be set? What a day of
excitement I have had to be sure! But I must get away from Verona, or
who knows how much farther the Roundabout Pegasus may carry me?

We were saying, my Muse, before we dropped and perched on earth for a
couple of sentences, that our unsaid words were in some limbo or other,
as real as those we have uttered; that the thoughts which have passed
through our brains are as actual as any to which our tongues and pens
have given currency. For instance, besides what is here hinted at, I
have thought ever so much more about Verona: about an early Christian
church I saw there; about a great dish of rice we had at the inn; about
the bugs there; about ever so many more details of that day's journey
from Milan to Venice; about Lake Garda, which lay on the way from Milan,
and so forth. I say what fine things we have thought of, haven't we, all
of us? Ah, what a fine tragedy that was I thought of, and never wrote!
On the day of the dinner of the Oystermongers' Company, what a noble
speech I thought of in the cab, and broke down--I don't mean the
cab, but the speech. Ah, if you could but read some of the unwritten
Roundabout Papers, how you would be amused! Aha! my friend, I catch you
saying, "Well, then, I wish THIS was unwritten with all my heart." Very
good. I owe you one. I do confess a hit, a palpable hit.

One day in the past month, as I was reclining on the bench of thought,
with that ocean The Times newspaper spread before me, the ocean cast up
on the shore at my feet two famous subjects for Roundabout Papers, and I
picked up those waifs, and treasured them away until I could polish them
and bring them to market. That scheme is not to be carried out. I can't
write about those subjects. And though I cannot write about them, I may
surely tell what are the subjects I am going NOT to write about.

The first was that Northumberland Street encounter, which all the papers
have narrated. Have any novelists of our days a scene and catastrophe
more strange and terrible than this which occurs at noonday within a few
yards of the greates