ade,
When he comes knocking at the student's door,
Something as poet, if as blackguard more.

Poet and blackguard. Of the first--how much?
As to the second, in quite perfect touch
With folly and sorrow, even shame and crime,
He lived the grief and wonder of his time!
Marked for reproaches from his life's beginning;
Extremely sinned against as well as sinning;
Hack, spendthrift, starveling, duellist in turn;
Too cross to cherish yet too fierce to spurn;
Begrimed with ink or brave with wine and blood;
Spirit of fire and manikin of mud;
Now shining clear, now fain to starve and skulk;
Star of the cellar, pensioner of the bulk;
At once the child of passion and the slave;
Brawling his way to an unhonoured grave--
That was _DICK SAVAGE_! Yet, ere his ghost we raise
For these more decent and less desperate days,
It may be well and seemly to reflect
That, howbeit of so prodigal a sect,
Since it was his to call until the end
Our greatest, wisest Englishman his friend,
'Twere all-too fatuous if we cursed and scorned
The strange, wild creature _JOHNSON_ loved and mourned.

Nature is but the oyster--Art's the pearl:
Our _DICK_ is neither sycophant nor churl.
Not as he was but as he might have been
Had the Unkind Gods been poets of the scene,
Fired with our fancy, shaped and tricked anew
To touch your hearts with love, your eyes with rue,
He stands or falls, ere he these boards depart,
Not as dead Nature but as living Art.

III. ADMIRAL GUINEA

_By W. E. Henley and R. L. Stevenson_,
_Avenue Theatre_, _Monday_, _November_ 29, 1897.

Spoken by Miss ELIZABETH ROBINS.

Once was an Age, an Age of blood and gold,
An Age of shipmen scoundrelly and bold--
_BLACKBEARD_ and _AVORY_, _SINGLETON_, _ROBERTS_, _KIDD_:
An Age which seemed, the while it rolled its quid,
Brave with adventure and doubloons and crime,
Rum and the Ebony Trade: when, time on time,
Real Pirates, right Sea-Highwaymen, could mock
The carrion strung at _EXECUTION DOCK_;
And the trim Slaver, with her raking rig,
Her cloud of sails, her spars superb and trig,
Held, in a villainous ecstasy of gain,
Her musky course from _BENIN_ to the _MAIN_,
And back again for niggers:
When, in fine,
Some thought that _EDEN_ bloomed across the Line,
And some, like _COWPER'S NEWTON_, lived to tell
That through those parallels ran the road to Hell.

Once was a pair of Friends, who loved to chance
Their feet in any by-way of Romance:
They, like t