n. A
noted debater, he made frequent use of the device of attacking the
weakness of the other man's speech, rather than the weakness of
the other man's argument. His prose was good, though at its best
so impersonal that it recalled the manner of an exceptionally
well-written leading article. At its worst it was marred by
numerous vulgarities and errors of taste, not always, it is to be
feared, intentional. His attitude on this point was typical of his
strange blindness to the necessity of a pure artistic ideal. He
committed these extravagances, he would say, in order to irritate
his audience into a condition of mental alertness. As a matter of
fact, he generally made his readers more sorry than angry, and he
did not realise that even if he had been successful it was but a
poor reward for the wanton spoiling of much good work. He
proclaimed himself to be above criticism, but he was only too
often beneath it. Revolting against the dignity, not infrequently
pompous, of his fellow-men of letters, he played the part of clown
with more enthusiasm than skill. It is intellectual arrogance in a
clever man to believe that he can play the fool with success
merely because he wishes it.

There is no need for me to enter into detail with regard to Dale's
personal appearance; the caricaturists did him rather more than
justice, the photographers rather less. In his younger days he
suggested a gingerbread man that had been left too long in the sun;
towards the end he affected a cultured and elaborate ruggedness that
made him look like a duke or a market gardener. Like most clever men,
he had good eyes.

Nor is it my purpose to add more than a word to the published
accounts of his death. There is something strangely pitiful in that
last desperate effort to achieve humour. We have all read the account
of his own death that he dictated from the sick-bed--cold,
epigrammatic, and, alas! characteristically lacking in taste. And
once more it was his fate to make us rather sorry than angry.

In the third scene of the second act of "Henry V.," a play written
by an author whom Dale pretended to despise, Dame Quickly describes
the death of Falstaff in words that are too well known to need
quotation. It was thus and no otherwise that Dale died. It is thus
that every man dies.

Blue Blood

He sat in the middle of the great cafe with his head supported
on his hands, miserable even to bitterness. Inwardly he cursed the
ancestors who had