Believe me, you are not alone.  In fact, there are so many like you that it would be quite easy for you to find society without worrying me.  And, for all of us, there is the consolation that, though we fail as writers, we may still succeed as citizens, as husbands and fathers and friends.  As Whitman would say—­because you are not Editor of The Times, do you give in that you are less than a man?  There are poets that have never entered into the Bodley Head, and great prose-writers who have never sat in an editorial chair.  Be satisfied with your heavenly crowns, O you whining unsuccessful, and leave to your inferiors the earthly five-shilling pieces.

A POET IN THE CITY

  ’In the midway of this our mortal life,
  I found me in a gloomy wood, astray.’

I (and when I say I, I must be understood to be speaking dramatically) only venture into the City once a year, for the very pleasant purpose of drawing that twelve-pound-ten by which the English nation, ever so generously sensitive to the necessities, not to say luxuries, of the artist, endeavours to express its pride and delight in me.  It would be a very graceful exercise of gratitude for me here to stop and parenthesise the reader on the subject of all that twelve-pound-ten has been to me, how it has quite changed the course of my life, given me that long-desired opportunity of doing my best work in peace, for which so often I vainly sighed in Fleet Street, and even allowed me an indulgence in minor luxuries which I could not have dreamed of enjoying before the days of that twelve-pound-ten.  Now not only peace and plenty, but leisure and luxury are mine.  There is nothing goes so far as—­Government money.

Usually on these literally State occasions, I drive up in state, that is in a hansom.  There is only one other day in the year on which I am so splendid, but that is another beautiful story.  It, too, is a day and an hour too joyous to be approached otherwise than on winged wheels, too stately to be approached in merely pedestrian fashion.  To go on foot to draw one’s pension seems a sort of slight on the great nation that does one honour, as though a Lord Mayor should make his appearance in the procession in his office coat.

So I say it is my custom to go gaily, and withal stately, to meet my twelve-pound-ten in a hansom.  For many reasons the occasion always seems something of an adventure, and I confess I always feel a little excited about it—­indeed, to tell the truth, a little nervous.  As I glide along in my state barge (which seems a much more proper and impressive image for a hansom than ‘gondola,’ with its reminiscences of Earl’s Court) I feel like some fragile country flower torn from its roots, and bewilderingly hurried along upon the turbid, swollen stream of London life.