This style however was not altogether to the taste of the munificent Prince.  He had expected something stronger, something more in the grand manner.  So he consulted a Wise Man, an adept in the ways of poets, one greatly in demand as a writer of biographical prefaces to poetical reprints.

The Wise Man heard him to the end and replied as follows:  “Sire, you have been ill-advised.  Who ever heard of a happy poet?  Poetry and prosperity are incompatible.  Instead of trying to make your protege joyful you should have heaped sorrow upon him.  It is well known that sorrow ennobles a man and enlarges his emotional experience.  ’Poets learn in suffering what they teach in song’ sang one of them who knew.

“However it is not too late.  When next he seeks your Presence, indicate to him with that tact which is the birthright of princes that he no longer enjoys your favour.  At the same time stop his pension and allow him to taste once more the life from which your bounty removed him.  Could you contrive that he loses the affection of his wife, and that he falls into a consumption, so much the better.  In addition, if it please your Highness, I will arrange that all his work is unfavourably noticed in the Press and that calumnies concerning his private life are circulated in the personal paragraph columns.”

“Thanks very much,” said the Prince, and dismissed the Wise Man with a handsome fee.

A few days later, when the poet presented himself at Court, the monarch rose from his throne, took a short run and kicked him in a vulnerable part.  Breathless the poet was borne by lackeys from the royal presence, wherein he never again showed himself.  At the next meeting of the Council the Prince annulled his pension by a stroke of the pen.  Thus the poet was thrust back into the cold world.

Now began a period for him of intense unhappiness.  Having lost his old business connection he could no longer obtain employment in his original vocation.  He had therefore no alternative to avert starvation but to follow the precarious calling of a cab-runner.  These events, it will be recalled, happened in a bygone age, before the motor superseded the horse.  Often, after a weary trail half across the town behind a luggage-laden Cab, only to find that the family kept a man-servant, he would return to the cellar that was now his home, penniless and exhausted.

Long hours spent over the washtub, to eke out their scanty earnings, had rendered his wife—­once the “Fay” of the “Love Songs”—­both muscular and short-tempered.  On such occasions she would lay hands on the poet and thrash him till he wept.  But throughout all he remained a poet, for the poet is born not made.  Every tear in falling turned to a sonnet.  His sorrows were transmuted into poems—­poems now suffused with the concentrated emotions of the human race.