ted the successive efforts of
friends to make a business man of him, and was about to begin the
earning of a living by his pen. A dozen years later we see him with
developed talents and a valuable name, but broken in fortune and spirit,
and gloomily anticipating death months before it came. The Jew usurers,
whose race he despised, had long been his real masters, and, with a
nature sensitive in the extreme, he writhed in their bondage.

Improvidence had been not merely an unhappy incident, as it is in the
lives of so many young men of artistic tastes; it had overweighted him
more or less for years, and 'the thoughtless writer of thoughtful
literature,' as the author of his biographical memoir has called him,
sank beneath it while yet at the beginning of a career full of the
brightest promise. The sort of companionship that pleased his careless
youth had latterly proved unsatisfying, and to some extent distasteful
to him. Its effects upon his character were so unfavourable that some
who had been his companions in journalism felt it necessary, after his
death, to credit him with a greater capacity for kindly forbearance
towards humanity than is apparent in the bulk of his writings.

'My friend,' says one writer, 'was one of those many geniuses who appear
to be born to prove the vast amount of contradictory elements which can
exist in the same individual. In his case these contradictions were so
apparent--and, if I may use the term, so contradictory--that, unless one
knew him, it was impossible to believe what his nature was. On the one
hand, he was recklessly generous, impulsively partisan, morbidly
sensitive, and highly chivalrous; on the other, forgetful of
obligations, defiantly antagonistic, unnecessarily caustic, and
affectedly cynical.... His life was one of impulse, and the direction of
the impulse depended solely on surrounding circumstances.... He has
passed from us at an early age, leaving behind him some enemies made,
perhaps, by his own waywardness; but he has left many friends,
too,--friends who loved him for the good that was in him.'

In another sketch of the author, his character is thus summed up:
'Caustic he was sometimes, and cynical always; but beneath there beat a
heart of gold--a heart tender and pitiful as a woman's.' This estimate
is amply justified by the power of pathos and the often tender analysis
of human feeling in _For the Term of his Natural Life_, however absent
the same qualities may see