REST IN LONDON
Cemetery into the inner warmth of the "fane". And it pleased him to recite his verses there, because there, it seemed to him, they sounded better than in Clerkenwell.
He came to see me once or twice, then I lost touch with him, and going down to Clerkenwell, found that his little shop had another tenant. He had been run over by a brewer's dray. His verses—half a hundred-weight of them—had been removed by a medical student from the hospital to which he had been taken. There were vague ideas in Clerkenwell that they were going to be made into a book, so that Posterity may still benefit, and his dust, which duly lies in Kensal Green, may still ensue "translation". London is full of such men—poets, generals, framers of laws, men of great mechanical talents, of great strength of will, of lofty intellects. They get called "characters" because they never have the chance, or have not the luck, the knack of self-advertisement, the opening to use their talents, their wills, their intellects. And this is the heaviest indictment that can be brought against a city or a world—that it finds no employment for its talents, that it uses them merely to form layers, as it were, of fallen leaves, that it blunts our sense of individualities.
This London does more than any other place in the world. As a city, it seems, as has been said, not only to turn Parsees into Londoners but to make us, who are Londoners, absolutely indifferent to the Parsees, the Kaffirs, the pickpockets or the men of genius we
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