The princes of Italy knew better--they called in the poet and the
painter, the dreamers to dream for them.

You call in your "practical" architect, and he builds you a brick box;
not for a hundred thousand pounds in fees could he build you a palace or
a cathedral.

The most ignorant of men are the "practical" people. It is meet and
fitting that they should be worshipped and set on high. The calf
worshipped of old was at least golden, and these are of lead.

But Alere could not go; he would do anything he was asked in this way;
he would take infinite pains to please, but he could not leave Fleet
Street for any mansion.

When a man once gets into Fleet Street he cannot get out.

Conventionally, I suppose, it would be the right thing to represent
Alere as a great genius neglected, or as a genius destroyed by
intemperance. The conventional type is so easy--so accepted--so popular;
it would pay better, perhaps, to make him out a victim in some way.

He was not neglected, neither was he the victim of intemperance in the
usual sense.

The way to fame and fortune had always been wide open to him; there were
long intervals when he did not drink, nor did drink enfeeble his touch;
it was not half so much to struggle against as the chest diseases from
which professional men so often suffer; I believe if he had really tried
or wished he could have conquered his vice altogether. Neither of these
causes kept him from the foremost rank.

There was no ambition, and there was no business-avarice. So many who
have no ideal are kept hard at work by the sheer desire of money, and
thus spurred onward, achieve something approaching greatness. Alere did
not care for money.

He could not get out of Fleet Street. Ten pounds was a large sum in the
company he frequented; he did not want any more.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

CHAPTER XXIX.

SOMETHING in Fleet Street holds tight those who once come within its
influence. The cerebellum of the world, the "grey matter" of the world's
brain, lies somewhere thereabouts. The thoughts of our time issue
thence, like the radiating spokes of a wheel, to all places of the
earth. There you have touch of the throbbing pulse of the vast
multitudes that live and breathe. Their ideas come from Fleet Street.

From the printing-press and the engraver's wood-block, the
lithographic-stone, the etcher's plate, from book and magazine,
periodical and pamphlet, from world-read newspa