“You have conquered,” she said, “and the faery kingdom is yours for ever, and you shall visit it and dwell in it whenever you desire, and reveal its sounds and its sights to the mortals of the world:  and in my kingdom you shall see, as though in a mirror, the pageant of mankind, the scroll of history, and the story of man which is writ in brave, golden and glowing letters, of blood and tears and fire.  And there is nothing in the soul of man that shall be hid from you; and you shall speak the secrets of my kingdom to mortal men with a voice of gold and of honey.  And when you grow weary of life you shall withdraw for ever into the island of faery voices which lies in the heart of my kingdom.  And as for me I go to the everlasting Limbo.”

Then Proserpine vanished, and William awoke from his dream, and went home to his butcher’s shop.

Soon after this he left his native village and went to London, where he became well known; although how his surname shall be spelt is a matter of dispute, some spelling it Shakespeare, some Shakespere, and some Shaksper.

THE IKON

Ferroll was an intellectual, and he prided himself on the fact.  At Cambridge he had narrowly missed being a Senior Wrangler, and his principal study there had been Lunar Theory.  But when he went down from Cambridge for good, being a man of some means, he travelled.  For a year he was an honorary Attache at one of the big Embassies.  He finally settled in London with a vague idea of some day writing a magnum opus about the stupidity of mankind; for he had come to the conclusion by the age of twenty-five that all men were stupid, irreclaimably, irredeemably stupid; that everything was wrong; that all literature was really bad, all art much overrated, and all music tedious in the long run.

The years slipped by and he never began his magnum opus; he joined a literary club instead and discussed the current topic of the day.  Sometimes he wrote a short article; never in the daily Press, which he despised, nor in the reviews (for he never wrote anything as long as a magazine article), but in a literary weekly he would express in weary and polished phrases the unemphatic boredom or the mitigated approval with which the works of his fellow-men inspired him.  He was the kind of man who had nothing in him you could positively dislike, but to whom you could not talk for five minutes without having a vague sensation of blight.  Things seemed to shrivel up in his presence as though they had been touched by an insidious east wind, a subtle frost, a secret chill.  He never praised anything, though he sometimes condescended to approve.  The faint puffs of blame in which he more generally indulged were never sharp or heavy, but were like the smoke rings of a cigarette which a man indolently smoking blows from time to time up to the ceiling.