SEVEN MEN by Max Beerbohm Transcriber’s Note: From the version of “Seven Men” published in 1919 by William Heinemann (London). Two of the stories have been omitted (“James Pethel” and “A.V. Laider”) since they are available separately from Project Gutenberg. In this plain ASCII version, emphasis and syllable stress italics have been converted to capitals; foreign italics and accents have been removed In “Enoch Soames:” I added a missing closing quotation mark in the following phrase: ‘Ten past two,’ he said. In “Hilary Maltby and Stephen Braxton:” I changed the opening double quote to a single quote in: ‘I wondered what old Mr. Abraham Hayward... and ‘I knew that if I leaned forward... ENOCH SOAMES When a book about the literature of the eighteen-nineties was given by Mr. Holbrook Jackson to the world, I looked eagerly in the index for SOAMES, ENOCH. I had feared he would not be there. He was not there. But everybody else was. Many writers whom I had quite forgotten, or remembered but faintly, lived again for me, they and their work, in Mr. Holbrook Jackson’s pages. The book was as thorough as it was brilliantly written. And thus the omission found by me was an all the deadlier record of poor Soames’ failure to impress himself on his decade. I daresay I am the only person who noticed the omission. Soames had failed so piteously as all that! Nor is there a counterpoise in the thought that if he had had some measure of success he might have passed, like those others, out of my mind, to return only at the historian’s beck. It is true that had his gifts, such as they were, been acknowledged in his life-time, he would never have made the bargain I saw him make--that strange bargain whose results have kept him always in the foreground of my memory. But it is from those very results that the full piteousness of him glares out. Not my compassion, however, impels me to write of him. For his sake, poor fellow, I should be inclined to keep my pen out of the ink. It is ill to deride the dead. And how can I write about Enoch Soames without making him ridiculous? Or rather, how am I to hush up the horrid fact that he WAS ridiculous? I shall not be able to do that. Yet, sooner or later, write about him I must. You will see, in due course, that I have no option. And I may as well get the thing done now.