at least a solid hundred a year; Metropolis (once it began to pay) for a solid two hundred and fifty or more; other papers for small and varying sums.  When he totted it all up together he found that he was affluent.  He could reckon on a round four hundred all told.  In Torrington Square, by the practice of a little ingenious economy, he could easily live on a hundred and twenty-five; so that by the end of the first year he should have saved the considerable sum of two hundred and seventy-five pounds.  At that rate, in three years—­no, in two years and a—­well, in rather more than two and a half years the thing would be done.  By a little extra exertion he might be able to reduce it to two years; to one, perhaps, by a magnificent stroke of luck.  Such luck, for instance, as a stage success, a run of a hundred nights for the tragedy whose First Act he was writing now.

That, of course, it would be madness to count on; but he had some hopes from the sudden and extraordinary transformation of The Museion.

Sudden enough, to the uninitiated, seeing that in September, ninety-seven, the organ of philosophic criticism to all appearances died, and that in October it burst into life again under a new cover and a new title, Jewdwine himself sounding the trump of resurrection. The Museion’s old contributors knew it no more; or failed to recognise it in Metropolis.  On the tinted cover there was no trace of the familiar symbolic head-piece, so suggestive of an Ionic frieze, but the new title in the broadest, boldest, blackest of type proclaimed its almost wanton repudiation of the old tradition.

Jewdwine’s first “concession to modernity,” was a long leading review of the “Art of Herbert Rankin.”  Herbert Rankin was so much amused with it that it kept him quiet for at least three weeks in his playground of The Planet.  After such a handsome appreciation as that, he had to wait a decent interval before “going for Jewdwine.”  When he remarked to Rickman that it would have been more to the purpose if Jewdwine had devoted his six columns to the Art of S.K.R., Rickman blushed and turned his head away, as if Rankin had been guilty of some gross indelicacy.  He was still virginally sensitive where Jewdwine was concerned.

But, in a sense not intended by Rankin, Jewdwine was very much occupied, not to say perturbed by the art of S.K.R.  Not exactly to the exclusion of every other interest; for Rickman, looking in on the great editor one afternoon, found him almost enthusiastic over his “last discovery.”  A new poet, according to Jewdwine, had arisen in the person of an eminent Cabinet Minister, who in ninety-seven was beguiling the tedium of office with a very pretty playing on the pastoral pipe.  Mr. Fulcher’s In Arcadia lay on the editorial table, bound in white vellum, with the figure of the great God Pan symbolizing Mr. Fulcher, on the cover.  Jewdwine’s attitude to Mr. Fulcher was for Jewdwine humble, not to say reverent.  He intimated to Rickman that in Fulcher he had found what he had wanted.