Seven Men

As a leading member of the literary life of that past time, he writes "with such circumstantial detail and such gentle realism" that readers are lulled almost into accepting the fantastic events that he describes.

[1] Four of the five stories in the collection had previously appeared in The Century Magazine: "James Pethel" in January 1915, "Enoch Soames" in May 1916, "A. V. Laider" in June 1916, "Hilary Maltby" (under that title) in February 1919.

[3] The growing popularity of the collection, already described as "a little masterpiece" by Virginia Woolf,[4] was endorsed by the same judgment being repeated in a recent Encyclopædia Britannica.

[6] Seven Men includes three supernatural comedies, "Enoch Soames: A Memory of the Eighteen-Nineties", "Hilary Maltby and Stephen Braxton" and "A. V. Laider".

Then a chance remark about palmistry leads Laider to admit once foreseeing the future death of his companions in their palms on a return by train from a stay in the country and not warning them through weakness of will.

They pass the rest of their stay in comfortable silence until on the final evening a chance remark reminds Laider of something awful that had once happened to him.

Max attempts to play the good angel to Ledgett, a popular author whose reputation is being ruined by deprecating remarks made about him in the posthumously published letters of the great.

To restore Ledgett's confidence, Max persuades Argallo, a late literary success, to write four letters addressed to Beerbohm that praise the writer's work.

He then discovers an unfinished verse drama full of anachronisms, not the least of which are modern idioms adapted to Elizabethan English – "Seeming hawk is dove/ And dove's a gaol-bird now.