Published in Six Common Things, November 1893
(First read 19/09/2014)
More death, I'm afraid. In this little character sketch (kind of) our Unnamed Narrator meets, as a bookish boy, an elderly scholar who takes his fancy. Said gent is engaged on the task of compiling an encyclopedia of Greek mythology, as Victorian gents were wont to do: there are very distinct shades of Mr Casaubon in Middlemarch here ~ he who spent a lifetime preparing to write a book on mythology. Anyway, half a dozen or so years pass as in a dream and UN goes to stay with the scholar, now definitely in Last-Legs-Land ... and the inevitable comes to pass. And lo! it turns out that he's spent so long on writing his book that it's become hopelessly out-of-date, old-fashioned, unpublishable.
So, more meditative musings on the futility of human endeavour, told in EFB's most wistful/melancholy style ~ if you like this kind of thing (as I do), you'll be in clover. It can be found online here.
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