In the dedication of PRINCE OTTO he says, 'Well, we will not give
in that we are finally beaten. . . . I still mean to get my health
again; I still purpose, by hook or crook, this book or the next, to
launch a masterpiece.' It would be a churlish or a very dainty
critic who should deny that he has launched masterpieces, but
whether he ever launched his masterpiece is an open question. Of
the story that he was writing just before his death he is reported
to have said that 'the goodness of it frightened him.' A goodness
that frightened him will surely not be visible, like Banquo's
ghost, to only one pair of eyes. His greatest was perhaps yet to
come. Had Dryden died at his age, we should have had none of the
great satires; had Scott died at his age, we should have had no
Waverley Novels. Dying at the height of his power, and in the full
tide of thought and activity, he seems almost to have fulfilled the
aspiration and unconscious prophecy of one of the early essays:



'Does not life go down with a better grace foaming in full body
over a precipice, than miserably straggling to an end in sandy
deltas?

'When the Greeks made their fine saying that those whom the gods
love die young, I cannot help believing that they had this sort of
death also in their eye. For surely, at whatever age it overtake
the man, this is to die young. Death has not been suffered to take
so much as an illusion from his heart. In the hot-fit of life, a-
tiptoe on the highest point of being, he passes at a bound on to
the other side. The noise of the mallet and chisel is scarcely
quenched, the trumpets are hardly done blowing, when, trailing with