roken, and I have often
marvelled myself how he managed it. But breathless as he might be, he
always laughed his greeting. I cannot think of Henley as he was in his
prime, to borrow a word that was a favourite with him, without hearing
his laugh and seeing his face illuminated by it. Rarely has a man so
hampered by his body kept his spirit so gay. He was meant to be a
splendid creature physically and fate made of him a helpless
cripple--who was it once described him as "the wounded Titan"? Everybody
knows the story: he made sure that everybody should by telling it in his
_Hospital Verses_. But everybody cannot know who did not know him how
bravely he accepted his disaster. It seemed to me characteristic once
when a young cousin of mine, a girl at the most susceptible age of
hero-worship, meeting him for the first time in our chambers and
volunteering, in the absence of anybody else available, to fetch the cab
he needed, thought his allowing her to go on such an errand for him the
eccentricity of genius and never suspected his lameness until he stood
up and took his crutch from the corner. There was nothing about him to
suggest the cripple.

[Illustration: Painting by William Nicholson
W.E. HENLEY]

He was a remarkably handsome man, despite his disability, tall and large
and fair, a noble head and profile, a shock of red hair, short red
beard, keen pale blue eyes, his indomitable gaiety filling his face with
life and animation, smoothing out the lines of pain and care. He was so
striking in every way, his individuality so strangely marked that the
wonder is the good portrait of him should be the exception. Nicholson,
when painting him, was a good deal preoccupied with the big soft hat and
blue shirt and flowing tie, feeling their picturesque value, and turned
him into a brigand, a land pirate, to the joy of Henley, whom I always
suspected of feeling this value himself and dressing as he did for the
sake of picturesqueness. Simon Bussy seemed to see, not Henley, but
Stevenson's caricature--the John Silver of _Treasure Island_, the
cripple with the face as big as a ham. Even Whistler failed and never
printed more than one or two proofs of the lithograph for which Henley
sat. Rodin came nearest success, his bust giving the dignity and
ruggedness and character of head and profile both. He and Nicholson
together go far to explain the man.

Unfortunately there is no biography at all. Charles Whibley was to have
written the