thing for him. But after a very brief acquaintance you never
thought of his disfigurements at all, and talked to him as you might
to Romeo or Lovelace; only, so many people, especially women, would
not risk the preliminary ordeal, that he remained a man apart and a
bachelor all his days. I am not to be frightened or prejudiced by a
tumor; and I struck up a cordial acquaintance with him, in the course
of which he kept me pretty closely on the track of his work at the
Museum, in which I was then, like himself, a daily reader.

He was by profession a man of letters of an uncommercial kind. He was
a specialist in pessimism; had made a translation of Ecclesiastes of
which eight copies a year were sold; and followed up the pessimism of
Shakespear and Swift with keen interest. He delighted in a hideous
conception which he called the theory of the cycles, according to
which the history of mankind and the universe keeps eternally
repeating itself without the slightest variation throughout all
eternity; so that he had lived and died and had his goitre before and
would live and die and have it again and again and again. He liked to
believe that nothing that happened to him was completely novel: he
was persuaded that he often had some recollection of its previous
occurrence in the last cycle. He hunted out allusions to this
favorite theory in his three favorite pessimists. He tried his hand
occasionally at deciphering ancient inscriptions, reading them as
people seem to read the stars, by discovering bears and bulls and
swords and goats where, as it seems to me, no sane human being can see
anything but stars higgledy-piggledy. Next to the translation of
Ecclesiastes, his _magnum opus_ was his work on Shakespear's Sonnets,
in which he accepted a previous identification of Mr W. H., the "onlie
begetter" of the sonnets, with the Earl of Pembroke (William Herbert),
and promulgated his own identification of Mistress Mary Fitton with
the Dark Lady. Whether he was right or wrong about the Dark Lady did
not matter urgently to me: she might have been Maria Tompkins for all
I cared. But Tyler would have it that she was Mary Fitton; and he
tracked Mary down from the first of her marriages in her teens to her
tomb in Cheshire, whither he made a pilgrimage and whence returned in
triumph with a picture of her statue, and the news that he was
convinced she was a dark lady by traces of paint still discernible.

In due course he publis