ime of his death.

If Lady Burton's treatment of her husband's unfinished works cannot be
defended, on the other hand I shall show that the loss as regards
The Scented Garden was chiefly a pecuniary one, and therefore almost
entirely her own. The publication of The Scented Garden would not--it
could not--have added to Burton's fame. However, the matter will be
fully discussed in its proper place.

It has generally been supposed that two other difficulties must confront
any conscientious biographer of Burton--the first being Burton's choice
of subjects, and the second the friction between Lady Burton and the
Stisteds. But as regards the first, surely we are justified in assuming
that Burton's studies were pursued purely for historical and scientific
purposes. He himself insisted in season and out of season that his
outlook was solely that of the student, and my researches for the
purposes of this work have thoroughly convinced me that, however much we
may deprecate some of these studies, Burton himself was sincere enough
in his pursuit of them. His nature, strange as it may seem to some
ears, was a cold one [15]; and at the time he was buried in the most
forbidding of his studies he was an old man racked with infirmities.
Yet he toiled from morning to night, year in year out, more like a navvy
than an English gentleman, with an income of L700 a year, and 10,000
"jingling, tingling, golden, minted quid," as R. L. Stevenson would have
said, in his pocket. In his hunger for the fame of an author, he forgot
to feed his body, and had to be constantly reminded of its needs by his
medical attendant and others. And then he would wolf down his food, in
order to get back quickly to his absorbing work. The study had become a
monomania with him.

I do not think there is a more pathetic story in the history of
literature than that which I have to tell of the last few weeks of
Burton's life. You are to see the old man, always ailing, sometimes in
acute pain--working twenty-five hours a day, as it were--in order to get
completed a work by which he supposed he was to live for ever. In the
same room sits the wife who dearly loves him, and whom he dearly loves
and trusts. A few days pass. He is gone. She burns, page by page, the
work at which he had toiled so long and so patiently. And here comes the
pathos of it--she was, in the circumstances, justified in so doing.
As regards Lady Burton and the Stisteds, it was natural, perhaps,
tha