I remember the mild thrill I had when, one evening, he took me aside and said in an undertone, ‘Savonarola has come on. Alive!’ For me the MS. hereinafter printed has an interest that for you it cannot have, so a-bristle am I with memories of the meetings I had with its author throughout the nine years he took over it. He never saw me without reporting progress, or lack of progress. Just what was going on, or standing still, he did not divulge. After the entry of Savonarola, he never told me what characters were appearing. ‘All sorts of people appear,’ he would say rather helplessly. ‘They insist. I can’t prevent them.’ I used to say it must be great fun to be a creative artist; but at this he always shook his head: ‘I don’t create. THEY do. Savonarola especially, of course. I just look on and record. I never know what’s going to happen next.’ He had the advantage of me in knowing at any rate what had happened last. But whenever I pled for a glimpse he would again shake his head: ‘The thing MUST be judged as a whole. Wait till I’ve come to the end of the Fifth Act.’ So impatient did I become that, as the years went by, I used rather to resent his presence at second nights. I felt he ought to be at his desk. His, I used to tell him, was the only drama whose future ought to concern him now. And in point of fact he had, I think, lost the true spirit of the second-nighter, and came rather to be seen than to see. He liked the knowledge that here and there in the auditorium, when he entered it, some one would be saying ‘Who is that?’ and receiving the answer ‘Oh, don’t you know? That’s “Savonarola” Brown.’ This sort of thing, however, did not make him cease to be the modest, unaffected fellow I had known. He always listened to the advice I used to offer him, though inwardly he must have chafed at it. Myself a fidgety and uninspired person, unable to begin a piece of writing before I know just how it shall end, I had always been afraid that sooner or later Brown would take some turning that led nowhither--would lose himself and come to grief. This fear crept into my gladness when, one evening in the spring of 1909, he told me he had finished the Fourth Act. Would he win out safely through the Fifth? He himself was looking rather glum; and, as we walked away from the theatre, I said to him, ‘I suppose you feel rather like Thackeray when he’d “killed the Colonel”: you’ve got to kill the Monk.’ ‘Not quite that,’ he answered. ‘But of course he’ll die very soon now. A couple of years or so. And it does seem rather sad. It’s not merely that he’s so full of life. He has been becoming much more HUMAN lately. At first I only respected him. Now I have a real affection for him.’ This was an interesting glimpse at last, but I turned from it to my besetting fear. ‘Haven’t you,’ I asked, ‘any notion of HOW he is to die?’ Brown shook his head.