Now the good man, though he had the perennial heart of a boy, was not young. Time, which had dealt gently with his disposition, had thinned his once flowing hair, made his limbs feeble, and set many a crowsfoot under his kindly eyes. Nor where the habits of the Bohemia he still inhabited favourable to longevity. The small hours always found him up, at work or play, and he saw little of the early sunshine. He was always behindhand with his work, always working against time; feeding irregularly, and at unreasonable hours; drinking, alas! more than was good for him, and even consuming that nicotine which would destroy even a Promethean liver. He had saved nothing, so that rest was denied him; and indeed he could not have rested, for he loved labour, in the old, reckless, perfunctory, Bohemian way. His old friends had gradually drifted away from him, died and been buried, or passed up to those shining social heights where dress suits and white linen are provided for aspiring pilgrims. Even managers of theatres, grown genteel too, pitied him. ‘Poor White,’ they would say; ‘he is such a Bohemian!’ So that his occupation partly failed him Good old blank-verse plays were no longer in demand. Brand-new adaptors, fresh from picking the pockets of French authors in Parisian forays, splashed him with the wheels of their triumphal chariots; gorgeous Jew _entrepreneurs_ shook their heads at him. ‘Vat ve vant now, my boy, is realism; plenty of swell clothes, and upholstery, and last cackle; the public don’t vant poetry, and as for blank verse, it ventilates de theatre. They’ll stand Shakespeare now and then, especially when Eugene Aram does it, because it’s genteel; but all de rest of de drama comsh from France.’ In his anxiety to suit the market he too tried pocket-picking, but he lacked the deft rapidity and supreme impudence of the dramatic thief by profession. He took too much trouble with work of this kind, and the public found it old-fashioned. So it came to pass that from one reason and another, whether because he was physically tired out or intellectually weary of a race in which he was unevenly handicapped, White began to show signs of failing health. Once or twice he took to his bed with some trifling ailment, and on each occasion so weak were his bodily powers that he found it hard work to get up again. He himself attached no importance to those indications of weakness; he was as cheerful to outward seeming, as sanguine, and as full of magnificent ‘subjects,’ as ever. He still sketched out tragedies which no one would produce on such pert subjects as ‘Semiramis,’ ‘Julian the Apostate,’ and ‘Boadicea,’ and infinitely laboured comedies full of the spirit of the Restoration. His style was still that of the last decadence, when Lalor Shiel was a genius and Sheridan Knowles a prophet. He still clung to the superstition which placed Bulwer Lytton in the pantheon of tinsel divinities. But the game was all over. _Et ille in Bohemia fuit_, that was all.