"The well of English undefiled, then."
"That is better. You are perfectly right. It is my firm conviction that my prose is quite equal to my poetry, and yet these dunces persist in saying that we poets can't write prose. Swinburne couldn't, it's true, and with tears in my eyes I used to beseech him to give up trying. But he was an obstinate little fellow. Milton couldn't, either. But Goethe now, Goethe could write prose as well as I can myself, and so could Wordsworth if he had liked, and so could Shelley. As for that yokel from Stratford-on-Avon, if there is anybody who dares to say he couldn't write prose, I should like to have the pleasure of contradicting him."
"I think," said I, "you will be among the prose-writers after your death. If I survive you, I shall hope to prepare a collected edition of the letters you have had rejected by the newspapers."
"That's a bargain, my boy. I will select them for you. It will be a nice little legacy to leave to posterity. A hundred years hence they will speak of me as the British Lucian who opened the stinking casements of a putrid age and let in God's honest sunlight. What a time we live in, and what a poisonous crew inhabits it! Why, do you know, my boy, we have less real freedom in this country than they have in Illyria."
The totally unexpected mention of the blessed word Illyria startled me considerably. That sinister kingdom was evidently in the air.
"You are right, Theodore," said I. "'The stinking casements of a putrid age'—that is a phrase I shall remember when next I am at the point of asphyxiation upon the green benches of the Mother of Parliaments."
"What a football-kicking, boat-tugging, gymnasium-bred crew they must be to stand such an atmosphere day after day, night after night! I shouldn't have thought that a really polite man could have existed in it for three days. I wonder what Edmund Burke thinks of the place when he enters it now."
A rough working knowledge of the subject with which I had to cope rendered it imperative that I should make a determined effort to lay hold of his head before he took charge of me altogether.
"Theodore," said I, "I am not here to yield to the delight of your conversation, much as I yearn to do so. I have brought a lady with me who desires to consult you about the stars."
He seemed to laugh a deep, hollow laugh out of the depths of himself, much as an ogre might be expected to do.