"Aristotle, in pointing me out as the person who can best tell you what this new Shavian drama of England really is; Aristotle, I say, may have acted with malice. He has, nevertheless, acted with great wisdom. I am indeed the only man out of the world (there is none in it), who does clearly and fully understand my little disciple who calls himself Bernard Shaw. Of the other friends and admirers of his, he might very well say what that great German philosopher Hegel said in his last moments: 'One man alone has understood me well,--and even he misunderstood me entirely.' He might with reference to my Cynic lady friend Hipparchia also say: 'One man alone understood me well,--and she was a woman.' "The fact is, Shaw, the son of Pooh-Pooh, is simply a goody disciple of my school, of the Cynics. When I was still within that mortal coil which men call skin and flesh, I did take all my sputterings and utterings very seriously, or as they say in cultured Mayfair: '_Oh grant serio_.' I really thought, as undoubtedly thinks my brave disciple in London, that my criticism of social, political, or religious things went deep into the essence of all that maintains Society, the State, and the Temples. Good old Plato, it is true, hinted at my vanity and conceit more than once, and I still feel the sting of his remark when once, soaked all through by the rain, I was surrounded by pitying folk: 'If you want to feel pity for Diogenes,' Plato said, 'then leave him alone.' "But I then did not heed any satire directed against me, being fully occupied with satirising others all day long. However, since that time, and since I have been given a corner in the palace of the immortals, lying on one of the steps like a dog, as that Italian dauber, whom they call Raphael, painted me in his 'School of Athens' (--a fresco which might be much better had Raphael wisely chosen his age and appeared as a Præ-Raphaelite--); ever since I have learnt a great deal, not only about others, but also about myself. "While you superior people drink nectar and partake of ambrosia, I enjoy with infinite zest the malicious pleasure of studying the capers, antics, and poses of my posthumous selfs, the Diogeneses of that speck on the mirror of eternity which the little ones below call 'our time.' Could anything be more amusing to a Cynic of about twenty-two centuries' standing like myself, who has heard and taught all the most nerve-rasping eccentricities imaginable, than to hear Tolstoy, Shaw, Ibsen, and _tutti quanti_, teach with thunderous ponderosity, and with penurious fulguration their doctrines as the latest and hitherto unheard-of delivery of the human or inhuman mind? I beg to assure you it is excruciatingly funny. But I feel I must tell you the whole story in due order. It happened thus.