GALLANT INVALIDS.

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume I, Issue 288, 25 November 1911, Page 4 (Supplement)

GALLANT INVALIDS.

Clark Russell, whose death was reported in a recent cable, was a bright example of tho writer who can keep his literary work unperturbed by personal miseries. Those breezy sea noyels gave no hint that their author was himself a man separated from all active hfo by the crippling of rheumatism. There was. the same heroic touch aboutFiank Smedley, whose rather blatantly athletic heroes were the ideals constructed by an invalid doomed’ to live m a world of mind instead of muscle. R.-L. Stevenson,.of course, is the mostrenowned instance or physical ills ignored through much manful work. Yi. E Henley more often betrayed the hit- • terness of one to w!n:*i “Scorn is allowed as part of his :d*f* at." A book of icminisccnces lat-'v rty !r**l r>w ' It was gall and wormwood to Henley t;* read the sentimental gush over Robert Louis Stevenson's Hl-ijmlth, :u.d les valiant efforts to live ami work in spit*» of it. For Stevenson'*. 1 uffi ”iii> ‘as moonlight unto sunlight and ' rs water unto wino' compared with the diurnal pain Henley had to endure.’’ The same writer speaks of Gilbert Venables, a fine athlete in his youth and a mighty swimmer, but so hurt by striking a sunken pile while diving at. Oxford that ho suffered chronic torture from spine trouble for tho rest of bis life. Y’ct Venables, of the “Standard.” became known as a brilliant and accomplished journalist, and seldom let oven his journalistic colleagues guess howgreat his sufferings were. That beloved vagabond. William Jeffrey Prow’s*', amongst other delightful qualities, could write and talk njost brilliantly on cricket. “It was one of life’s little ironies that the soul of as ardent a cricketer ar; ever breathed should have been encased in a body incapable of any athletic exertion." Another subject dear to this man of frail physique was Arctic exploration. A consumptive, ioomed to die in his early tliirtios, he excelled in cheerful sporting arfi* I s, wrote such verse as “The City of Prague," and Collected every known book on Polar discovery. Someone declared onee that be believed the height of '‘Jeff’s” ambition was to plnv a game of cricket on an .Arctic icefield, with tho Pole f ir a wicket I And Edward O'Neil, playwright and journalist, was a cricketer at heart-, equally denied tho power to engage in tiio pastime that he loved. As cricket editor for the “Theatrical and Musical Review." ho enjoyed, at least, his discerning watch over many a game. But cricket, even in this form, was a dangerous passion. “ He sat out in the damp during a particularly wet Canterbury week—determined to see every ball bowler!—caught a chill and di-’d within a month, a martyr to duty and sport "