forehead—­“you don’t understand what I
    mean”? 
Well, of course I knew you were stupid—­you always were stupid at school—­ Now don’t say you weren’t—­but I’m hanged if I thought you were quite
    such a fool! 
You don’t see the point of all this?  I was talking of sickness and death—­ In that poem I made years ago, I said this—­“Love, the flower-time
    whose breath
Smells sweet through a summer of kisses and perfumes an autumn of tears Is sadder at root than a winter—­its hopes heavy-hearted like fears.  Though I love your Grace more than I love little Letty, the maid of
    the mill,
Yet the heat of your lips when I kiss them” (you see we were intimate,
    Bill)
“And the beat of the delicate blood in your eyelids of azure and white Leave the taste of the grave in my mouth and the shadow of death on my
    sight. 
Fill the cup—­twine the chaplet—­come into the garden—­get out of the
    house—­
Drink to me with your eyes—­there’s a banquet behind, where worms
    only carouse! 
As I said to sweet Katie, who lived by the brook on the land Philip
    farmed—­
Worms shall graze where my kisses found pasture!” The Duchess, I may
    say, was charmed. 
It was read to the Duke, and he cried like a child.  If you’ll give me
    a pill,
I’ll go on till past midnight.  That poem was said to be—­Somebody’s, Bill.  But you see you can always be sure of my hand as the mother that bore me By the fact that I never write verse which has never been written
    before me. 
Other poets—­I blush for them, Bill—­may adore and repudiate in turn a Libitina, perhaps, or Pandemos; my Venus, you know, is Laverna.  Nay, that epic of mine which begins from foundations the Bible is
    built on—­
“Of man’s first disobedience”—­I’ve heard it attributed, dammy, to
    Milton. 
Well, it’s lucky for them that it’s not worth my while, as I may say,
    to break spears
With the hirelings, forsooth, of the press who assert that Othello was
    Shakespeare’s. 
When he that can run, sir, may read—­if he borrows the book, or goes
    on tick—­
In my poems the bit that describes how the Hellespont joins the Propontic.  There are men, I believe, who will tell you that Gray wrote the whole
    of The Bard—­
Or that I didn’t write half the Elegy, Bill, in a Country Churchyard.  When you know that my poem, The Poet, begins—­“Ruin seize thee!” and ends With recapitulations of horrors the poet invokes on his friends.  And I’ll swear, if you look at the dirge on my relatives under the turf,
    you
Will perceive it winds up with some lines on myself—­and begins with
    the curfew. 
Now you’ll grant it’s more probable, Bill—­as a man of the world, if
    you please—­
That all these should have prigged from myself than that I should have
    prigged from all these. 
I could cry when I think of it, friend, if such tears