gentle expectation that presently they will achieve the great feat.
Now if there is a man on earth who is the utter contrary of everything
that this description implies; whose very existence is an insult to
the ideal it realizes; whose eye disparages, whose resonant voice
denounces, whose cold shoulder jostles every decency, every delicacy,
every amenity, every dignity, every sweet usage of that quiet life of
mutual admiration in which perfect Shakespearian appreciation is
expected to arise, that man is Frank Harris. Here is one who is
extraordinarily qualified, by a range of sympathy and understanding
that extends from the ribaldry of a buccaneer to the shyest
tendernesses of the most sensitive poetry, to be all things to all
men, yet whose proud humor it is to be to every man, provided the man
is eminent and pretentious, the champion of his enemies. To the
Archbishop he is an atheist, to the atheist a Catholic mystic, to the
Bismarckian Imperialist an Anacharsis Klootz, to Anacharsis Klootz a
Washington, to Mrs Proudie a Don Juan, to Aspasia a John Knox: in
short, to everyone his complement rather than his counterpart, his
antagonist rather than his fellow-creature. Always provided, however,
that the persons thus confronted are respectable persons. Sophie
Perovskaia, who perished on the scaffold for blowing Alexander II to
fragments, may perhaps have echoed Hamlet's

Oh God, Horatio, what a wounded name--
Things standing thus unknown--I leave behind!

but Frank Harris, in his Sonia, has rescued her from that injustice,
and enshrined her among the saints. He has lifted the Chicago
anarchists out of their infamy, and shewn that, compared with the
Capitalism that killed them, they were heroes and martyrs. He has
done this with the most unusual power of conviction. The story, as he