no man has written yet.

If only Victor Hugo were alive and young again!

Alere liked pulling off the proofs in his shirt-sleeves, swigging his
stout, smoking on the sly, working with all the genius of an inspired
mechanic one moment and dropping into absolute idleness the next,
spending infinite pains in finishing one bit of work, as if his very
life depended on the smoothing of an edge of paper, putting off the next
till the end of the month, pottering, sleeping, gossiping, dreaming over
old German works, and especially dreaming over Goethe, humming old
German songs--for he had been a great traveller--sometimes scrawling a
furious Mazzinian onslaught in a semi-Nihilist foreign print, collecting
stray engravings, wandering hither and thither.

Alere Flamma, artist, engraver, bookbinder, connoisseur, traveller,
printer, Republican, conspirator, sot, smoker, dreamer, poet,
kind-hearted, good-natured, prodigal, shiftless, man of Fleet Street,
carpet-bag man, gentleman shaken to pieces.

He worked in his shirt-sleeves and drank stout, but nothing vulgar had
ever been recorded against Alere Flamma. He frequented strong
company--very strong meat--but no vile word left his lips.

There was a delicacy in all his ways in the midst of the coarsest
surroundings, just as he appeared in the press-room among the printer's
ink in the whitest of clean shirt-sleeves, fit to wear with the
abhorred dress-coat.

In his rooms at his lodgings there were literally hundreds of sketches,
done on all sorts and sizes of paper, from the inside of an envelope
hastily torn open to elephant. The bureau was full of them, crammed in
anyhow, neither sorted nor arranged; nothing, of course, could be found
if it was wanted. The drawers of the bookcase--it was his own
furniture--were full of them; the writing-table drawer; a box in one
corner; some were on the mantelpiece smoked and gritty; some inside his
books, most of which were interleaved in this manner; literally hundreds
of sketches, the subjects as numerous and varied.

Views in English country lanes, views on the Danube, bands playing in
band-loving Vienna, old Highgate Archway, studies from Canterbury
Cathedral, statuary in the Louvre, ships battling with the north wind in
the North Sea--a savage fight between sail and gale--horses in the
meadow, an aged butler, a boy whipping a top, charcoal-burners in the
Black Forest, studies from the nude--Parisian models, Jewesses, almost
life-size,