July 18, 1889.

I have just heard of the sudden death of an old friend.  Francis Willett was a writer of some distinction, whose acquaintance I made in my first years in London.  He was a tall, slim man, dark of complexion, who would have been called very handsome, if it had not been for a rather burdened air that he wore.  As it was, people tended rather to pity him, and to speak of him as somewhat of a mystery.  I never knew anything about the background of his life.  He must have had some small means of his own, and he lived in rooms, in rather an out-of-the-way street near Regent’s Park.  One used to see him occasionally in London, walking rapidly, almost always alone, and very rarely I encountered him at parties, always wearing a slightly regretful air, as though he were wishing himself away.  He wrote a good deal, reviewed books, and, I suppose, contrived to make enough to live on by his pen.  He once spoke of himself as being in the happy position of being able to exist without writing, but forced to purchase all small luxuries by work.  He published two or three books of short stories and sketches of travel, delicate pieces of work, which had no great sale, but gave him a recognised position among men of letters.  I drifted into a kind of friendship with him; we were members of the same club, and he sometimes used to flutter shyly into my rooms like a great moth; but he never asked me to his quarters.

I discovered that he had done well at Oxford, and also that he had once, at all events, had considerable ambitions; but his health was not strong, he was extremely sensitive, and very fastidious about the quality of his work.  I realised this on an occasion when he once entrusted me with a Ms., and asked me if I would give him an opinion, as it was an experiment, and he did not feel sure of his ground; he added that there was no hurry about it.  I put the Ms. away in a despatch-box, and having at the time a press of work, I forgot about it.  He never asked me for it, and I did not happen to open the box where it lay.  Some months after I came upon it.  I read it through, and thought it a fine and delicate piece of work.  I wrote to him, apologising for my delay and speaking warmly of the piece, which was one of those rather uncomfortable stories, which is not quite long enough to make a book, and yet rather too long to put in a volume with other pieces.  He wrote at once, thanking me for my opinion, and it was only by accident at a later date, when I happened to ask him what he was doing with the story, that he told me he had destroyed it.  I expressed deep regret that he had done so; and he said with a smile that it was probably rather a foolish impulse that had decided him to make away with it.  “The fact is,” he said, “that you wrote very kindly about it, but you had had it in your hands so long, that I felt somehow that it could not have interested you—­it really doesn’t matter,” he added, “I don’t think it was at all