so for "Memories and Opinions". So the atoll climbs
slowly out of a sea of troubles.'

Paragraph by paragraph the chapters grew, and always
with a characteristic care for the mot juste. At the time of
Q's death only four were completed and the curtain was
rung down on the prologue with the words:

'I . . . there set out a quire of virgin folio paper, and sat
down to write the first chapter of my first novel.'

An ending so finished to an unfinished composition
might seem too good to spoil. Yet, when the manuscript
of a portion of the fifth chapter was found at Fowey, not
finally revised, but embellished with many 'second thoughts',
it seemed foolish not to incorporate it with the rest, and
the narrative ends, therefore, not with the inception, but
with the publication, of Dead Man's Rock.

That was in 1887. The Astonishing History of Troy Town
appeared in the next year, to be followed by the long series
of novels and short stories, the poems, grave and gay, the
literary criticism, and, in 1900, The Oxford Book of
English Verse. Of the 25 years from 1887 we shall never
have the full and authentic record. Fragments of it may be
found in such books as From a Cornish Window or News
from the Duchy and occasionally, when in company with an
old friend like Charles Whibley, Q would be led to talk of
Fleet Street and Soho in the nineties--of Barrie's passion for
press-cuttings or of Henley's nicknames for Edmund Gosse.

By 1912 Q had completed The Oxford Book of Victorian
Verse and the dedication page heralded a new epoch: To my
future friends and pupils at Cambridge, this propitiatory
wreath. The King Edward VII Professorship of English
Literature at Cambridge had been founded in 1910. There
was then no school of English in the University and the
first holder of the chair had been one of the most brilliant
and adventurous classics of his generation, A. W. Verrall.

-viii-