n 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 door-step 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 door-step
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 override 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's 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. As for his landlady in Dyott Street, no
doubt he had paid her weekly, and what possessions he may have had in
his rooms were enough to save her from fretting. 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 grasp the obvious corollary that I have invented
nothing? The answer can