Now began a period for him of intense unhappiness. Having lost his old
business connection he could no longer obtain employment in his original
vocation. He had therefore no alternative to avert starvation but to
follow the precarious calling of a cab-runner. These events, it will
be recalled, happened in a bygone age, before the motor superseded
the horse. Often, after a weary trail half across the town behind a
luggage-laden Cab, only to find that the family kept a man-servant,
he would return to the cellar that was now his home, penniless and
exhausted.

Long hours spent over the washtub, to eke out their scanty earnings, had
rendered his wife--once the "Fay" of the "Love Songs"--both muscular and
short-tempered. On such occasions she would lay hands on the poet and
thrash him till he wept. But throughout all he remained a poet, for the
poet is born not made. Every tear in falling turned to a sonnet.
His sorrows were transmuted into poems--poems now suffused with the
concentrated emotions of the human race.

Nevertheless each one as it appeared was brutally slated in the organs
controlled by the literary adviser to the Crown, and himself belittled
and ridiculed. When, as luck would have it, his wife eloped with a
wrestler, a flood of melody poured from his soul which, connoisseurs
have assured us, ranks high amongst the lyrical masterpieces of the
world. These verses will be found amongst the collection known as
"Swan Songs," published posthumously, for, not long after, the poet
unfortunately developed phthisis and died.

But though he was thus cut-off in early manhood his name will live for
ever. It is borne by a square in the boarding-house quarter of the
capital and by a cravat which, though, alas, no longer in the fashion,