“Too much is written by the men who can’t write about the men who do write,” Martin concurred.  “Why, I was appalled at the quantities of rubbish written about Stevenson and his work.”

“Ghouls and harpies!” Brissenden snapped out with clicking teeth.  “Yes, I know the spawn—­complacently pecking at him for his Father Damien letter, analyzing him, weighing him—­”

“Measuring him by the yardstick of their own miserable egos,” Martin broke in.

“Yes, that’s it, a good phrase,—­mouthing and besliming the True, and Beautiful, and Good, and finally patting him on the back and saying, ‘Good dog, Fido.’  Faugh!  ‘The little chattering daws of men,’ Richard Realf called them the night he died.”

“Pecking at star-dust,” Martin took up the strain warmly; “at the meteoric flight of the master-men.  I once wrote a squib on them—­the critics, or the reviewers, rather.”

“Let’s see it,” Brissenden begged eagerly.

So Martin unearthed a carbon copy of “Star-dust,” and during the reading of it Brissenden chuckled, rubbed his hands, and forgot to sip his toddy.

“Strikes me you’re a bit of star-dust yourself, flung into a world of cowled gnomes who cannot see,” was his comment at the end of it.  “Of course it was snapped up by the first magazine?”

Martin ran over the pages of his manuscript book.  “It has been refused by twenty-seven of them.”

Brissenden essayed a long and hearty laugh, but broke down in a fit of coughing.

“Say, you needn’t tell me you haven’t tackled poetry,” he gasped.  “Let me see some of it.”

“Don’t read it now,” Martin pleaded.  “I want to talk with you.  I’ll make up a bundle and you can take it home.”

Brissenden departed with the “Love-cycle,” and “The Peri and the Pearl,” returning next day to greet Martin with:-

“I want more.”

Not only did he assure Martin that he was a poet, but Martin learned that Brissenden also was one.  He was swept off his feet by the other’s work, and astounded that no attempt had been made to publish it.

“A plague on all their houses!” was Brissenden’s answer to Martin’s volunteering to market his work for him.  “Love Beauty for its own sake,” was his counsel, “and leave the magazines alone.  Back to your ships and your sea—­that’s my advice to you, Martin Eden.  What do you want in these sick and rotten cities of men?  You are cutting your throat every day you waste in them trying to prostitute beauty to the needs of magazinedom.  What was it you quoted me the other day?—­Oh, yes, ’Man, the latest of the ephemera.’  Well, what do you, the latest of the ephemera, want with fame?  If you got it, it would be poison to you.  You are too simple, too elemental, and too rational, by my faith, to prosper on such pap.  I hope you never do sell a line to the magazines.  Beauty is the only master to serve.  Serve her and damn the multitude!  Success!  What in hell’s success if it isn’t right there in your Stevenson sonnet, which outranks Henley’s ‘Apparition,’ in that ‘Love-cycle,’ in those sea-poems?