ur of cigarettes,

Salter is made of sand and fire and an university extension ticket.

But the strongest element in all can not be expressed; I think it
is a sort of star.*

[* From _The Notebook_.]

There are fragments of a Morality Play entitled "The Junior Debating
Club," of a modern novel in which everyone of the Debaters makes his
appearance, of a mediaeval story called "The Legend of Sir Edmund of
the Brotherhood of the Jongleurs de Dieu." Notes, fragments, letters,
all show an intense individual interest that covered the life of each
of his friends. If one of them is worried, he worries too; if one
rejoices, he rejoices exceedingly. They write to him about their
ideas and views, their relations with one another, their reactions in
the world of Oxford life, their love affairs. "I am in need of some
literary tonic or blood-letting," says Vernede, "which you alone can
supply."

"I only hope," writes Bertram, "you may be as much use in the world
in future as you have been in the past to your friends."

"Most of the absent Club," writes Salter separated from the others,
"lie together in my pocket at this moment." And Gilbert writes in
_The Notebook:_

AN IDYLL

Tea is made; the red fogs shut round the house but the gas burns.
I wish I had at this moment round the table
A company of fine people.
Two of them are at Oxford and one in Scotland and two at other
places.
But I wish they would all walk in now, for the tea is made.

Gilbert was devoted to them all. But as we have seen, Bentley's was
the supreme friendship of his youth. It was a friendship in foolery
as we are told by the dedication of _Greybeards at Play:_

He was through boyhood's storm and shower
My best my nearest friend,
We wore one hat, smoked one cigar
One standing at each end.

It was a deeply serious friendship as we are told in the dedication
of _The Man Who Was Thursday_. With Bentley alone he shared the

Doubts that drove us through the night as we two talked amain,
And day had broken on the streets ere it broke upon the brain.

Most young men write or at least begin novels of which they are
themselves the heroes. Gilbert wrote and illustrated a fairy story
about a boyish romance of Lucian Oldershaw's while two unfinished
novels have Bentley for hero. He is, too, in the mediaeval story, Sir
Edmund of the Brotherhood of the Jongleurs de Dieu. Gilbert sings,
like all young poets,