Three years and more had passed since Will’s visit to the Tyrol. Events had moved fast for his fortunes meanwhile. He was a well-known man now in theatrical circles. Florian Wood went about, indeed, boasting in clubs and drawing-rooms that ’twas he who had discovered and brought out Will Deverill. “It’s all very well to be a poet,” he said, “and it’s all very well to be born with a head full of rhymes and tunes, of crochets, clefs, and quavers; but what’s the use of all that, I ask you my dear fellow, without a critic to push you? A Critic is a man with a fine eye for potentialities. Before the world sees, he sees; before the world hears, he listens. He sits by the world’s wayside, as it were, with open eye or ear, and catches unawares the first faint lisping notes of undeveloped genius. He divines in the bud the exquisite aroma and perfect hue of the full-blown blossom. Long ago, I said to Deverill, ‘You have the power within you to write a good opera!’ He laughed me to scorn; but I said to him, ‘Try!’—and the outcome was, _Honeysuckle_. He took up a battered fiddle one day at an old inn in the Zillerthal, when we two were rusticating on the emerald bosom of those charming unsophisticated Tyrolese valleys; he struck a few notes on it of his own composing; and I said to him, ‘My dear Will, Sullivan trembles on his pedestal.’ At the time he treated it as a mere passing joke; but I made him persevere; and what was the result?—why, those exquisite airs which found their way before long to the sheep-runs of Australia, and resounded from lumberers’ camps in the backwoods of Canada! The Critic, I say, is the true prophet and sage of our modern world; he sees what is to be, and he helps to produce it.” But whether Florian was right in attributing Will’s success to himself or not, it is certain, at least, that Will was rapidly successful. The world recognised in him a certain genuine poetical vein which has seldom been vouchsafed to the English librettist; it recognised in him, also, a certain depth and intensity of musical sense which has seldom been vouchsafed to the English dramatic composer.