There were consolations we might have offered him. We might have told him that he _had_ succeeded; we might have told him that, if he wanted a monument, he'd only got to look around him. After all, he'd made a business of it that enabled him to build a Tudor mansion with bathrooms everywhere and keep two motor-cars. We could have reminded him that there wasn't one of the things he'd got with it--no, not one bathroom--that he would have sacrificed, that he was capable of sacrificing; that he'd warmed himself jolly well all over and all the time before the fire of life, and that his cucumbers alone must have been a joy to him. And of course we might have told him that he couldn't have it both ways; that you cannot have bathrooms and motor-cars and cucumber-frames (not to the extent _he_ had them) _and_ the incorruptible and stainless glory. But that wouldn't have consoled him; for he wanted it both ways. Fellows like Wrackham always do. He wasn't really happy, as a really great man might have been, with his cucumbers and things. He kept on saying it was easy enough to destroy a Great Name. Did they know, did anybody know, what it cost to build one? I said to myself that possibly Antigone might know. All I said to him was, "Look here, we're agreed they can't do anything. When a man has once captured and charmed the great Heart of the Public, he's safe--in his lifetime, anyway." Then he burst out. "His lifetime? Do you suppose he cares about his lifetime? It's the life beyond life--the life beyond life." It was in fact, d'you see, the "Life and Letters." He was thinking about it then. He went on. "They have it all their own way. He can't retort; he can't explain; he can't justify himself. It's only when he's dead they'll let him speak." "Well, I mean to. That'll show 'em," he said; "that'll show 'em." "He's thinking of it, Simpson; he's thinking of it," Burton said to me that evening. He smiled. He didn't know what his thinking of it was going to mean--for him. IV He had been thinking of it for some considerable time. That pilgrimage was my last--it'll be two years ago this autumn--and it was in the spring of last year he died. He was happy in his death. It saved him from the thing he dreaded above everything, certainty of the ultimate extinction. It has not come yet. We are feeling still the long reverberation of his vogue. We miss him still in the gleam, the jest gone forever from the papers. There is no doubt but that his death staved off the ultimate extinction. It revived the public interest in him. It jogged the feeble pulse of his once vast circulation. It brought the familiar portrait back again into the papers, between the long, long columns. And there was more laurel and a larger crowd at Brookwood than on the day when we first met him in the churchyard at Chenies.