Without saying a word to me or even letting me know, in a few hasty hours Stead wrote in the “Review of Reviews” in February, 1910, the most extraordinarily accurate résumé of every date and name connected with my career. It would have taken any other man a month. However, he made one great mistake in it. He only spoke in it, like all other things that have been said of me, of “The full corn in the ear!” What really is a man’s life is the endurance and the adversity and the non-recognition and the humiliating slights and the fighting morning, noon and night, of early life. That brings fortune. I like that word “fortune.” Those inspired men who translated the Great Bible never said a thing “happened,” they always said it “fortuned.”

I here insert a letter kindly lent me by Lord Esher. As it was written on the spur of the moment and out of the abundance of the heart, I give it verbatim. Esher loved Stead as much as I did. I knew it, and that’s why I wrote to him. We felt a common affliction:—

April 22, 1912. Hotel Excelsior, Naples.

This loss of dear old Stead numbs me! Cromwell and Martin Luther rolled into one. And such a big heart. Such great emotions. You must write something. All I’ve read quite inadequate. The telegrams here say he was to the forefront with the women and children, putting them in the boats! I can see him! and probably singing “Hallelujah,” and encouraging the ship’s band to play cheerfully. He told me he would die in his boots. So he has. And a fine death. As a boy he had threepence a week pocket money. One penny bought Shakespeare in weekly parts, the other two pennies to his God for Missions. And the result was he became editor of a big newspaper at 22! And he was a Missionary himself all his life. Fearless even when alone, believing in his God—the God of truth—and his enemies always rued it when they fought him. He was an exploder of “gas-bags” and the terror of liars. He was called a “wild man” because he said “Two keels to one.” He was at Berlin—the High Personage said to him: “Don’t be frightened!” Stead replied to the All Highest: “Oh, no! we won’t! for every Dreadnought you build we will build two!” That was the genesis of the cry “Two keels to one.” I have a note of it made at the time for my “Reflections.” But, my dear friend, put your concise pen to paper for our Cromwellian Saint. He deserves it.

Yours always,
Fisher.

“You cannot do anyone more good than by trying unsuccessfully to do him an injury,” was one of the aphorisms of Lord Dalling (Sir Henry Bulwer); and it occurred to me forcibly on one occasion when I went to stay with my very great friend, Henry Labouchere (the proprietor of Truth). On the way I had been reading a peculiarly venomous attack on me in his paper; and when he greeted me as affectionately as ever, I showed it to him, saying: “Don’t put your arm on my shoulder! Read that damned thing there!” Labouchere glanced at it and replied, “Where would you have been if I hadn’t persistently maligned you?”

When I was with him at his villa at Florence, he used to smoke the most beastly cigarettes at ten a penny, yet he left over a million sterling, and was generous to absurdity to those he loved.

He had none but Italian servants; he told me he was always extremely polite to them for the knife came so easy to them. He said he didn’t realise this until, after he had had some words with an English friend, his Italian gardener, who had overheard the altercation, asked Labouchere if he would like him (the gardener) to deal with his friend, and he tapped the stiletto in his waistband.

His own wit was as ready as his gardener’s stiletto. On one occasion he was at Cologne railway station, and the Custom House Officer was turning his portmanteau inside out. Labouchere had a telegraph form in his pocket; he wrote out a telegram with a stylographic pen and handed it to the official who was standing behind the Custom House Officer and told him it was a Government telegram. This was the telegram:

Prince Bismarck,
Berlin.