Many Kings, Queens, and Ambassadors had been received there. Judges and warriors had stood there. The loveliest ladies of the land had come there. There were coats of arms^[32] with their lions and their leopards. There were the long tables with the gold and silver plates. There were vast marble fireplaces where nightly a whole oak tree, with its million leaves and its bird nests, was burnt to ashes. Nicholas Greene, the poet, stood there now, dressed in his old hat and a shabby black coat, holding a small bag in one hand.

Orlando, who rushed to greet him, was slightly disappointed. The poet was of medium height, lean and somewhat stooped. Entering the hall, he stepped on a dog, and the dog bit him. What is more, Orlando did not know where to place him^[33]. He belonged neither to servants, nor to noblemen. His head with its high forehead and big nose was fine, but the chin was small. The eyes were brilliant, but the lips hung loose^[34]. The expression of the face was disturbing – it was neither noble or pleasant to look at; nor was it a well-trained face of a servant. He was a poet, but it seemed that he would rather criticize than praise; quarrel than make peace; struggle than rest; hate than love. His movements were quick, and there was something suspicious in his glance. Orlando was taken aback^[35]. Yet they went to dinner.

Here Orlando was, for the first time, suddenly ashamed of the number of his servants and of the richness of his table. At dinner, the poet said that although the name of Greene was common, the family had been of the highest nobility in France. Unfortunately, they had lost their wealth and status and simply left their name to the royal district of Greenwich. Then he talked about lost castles, coats of arms, cousins in the north, noble families in the west, how some Greens wrote their name with an e at the end, and others without. Only by the end of the dinner did Orlando dare mention a more important matter than the Greens; that is the subject of poetry.

When the word was first mentioned, the poet's eyes flashed; he forgot his fine gentleman manners, banged his glass on the table, and began telling one of the longest and most passionate stories that Orlando had ever heard – about his play; another poet; and a critic. Orlando understood only that poetry was harder to sell than prose, and though the lines were shorter, it took longer to write.

So the talk went on and on, until Orlando mentioned that he himself had been trying to write. At that, the poet jumped up from his chair. A mouse had squeaked in the wall, he said. The truth was, he explained, that his nerves were in a poor state. A mouse's squeak could upset him for two weeks. The poet then gave Orlando the full story of his health for the past ten years or so. It had been so bad that it was a miracle that he still lived. He had had the palsy, the gout, the three kinds of fevers; in addition to which he had heart, spleen, liver and spine problems. Sometimes he woke with a brain like lead; other times it was as if a thousand candles or fireworks were burning inside him. He could feel a rose leaf through his mattress, he said. Altogether, he was finely made and curiously put together, and it surprised him that he had only sold five hundred copies of his poem. But that, of course, was due to the conspiracy against him. All he could say, in the end, banging his fist on the table, was that the art of poetry was dead in England.

'But what about Shakespeare, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Browne, Donne^[36]?' Orlando asked.

Greene laughed. Shakespeare, he admitted, had written some things that were good enough; but he had taken them from Marlowe. Marlowe was probably a nice boy, but what else could you say of a man who died before he was thirty? As for Browne, he was writing poetry in prose, and people soon got tired of it. Donne wrapped up his lack of meaning in hard words. As for Ben Jonson – that was his friend, and he never said bad things about his friends.

No, he concluded, the great age of literature had passed; the great age of literature was the Greek, not the Elizabethan age. In the past, men cherished an ambition. Now all young writers were writing any trash that would sell, and Shakespeare was one of them. Though it hurt him to say it, because he loved literature as he loved his life, he could see no good in the present and had no hope for the future. Here he poured himself another glass of wine.

Orlando was shocked by what he had heard; yet the critic himself did not seem pessimistic. On the contrary^[37], the more he criticized his own time, the more pleased with himself he became. He could remember, he said, a night at a tavern when Kit Marlowe was there. Kit was rather drunk and in a mood to say silly things. He was saying that they were on the verge of a great age in English literature, and that Shakespeare would play an important role in it. Happily for himself, he was killed two nights later in a drunken fight, and so did not live to see how it turned out. 'Poor foolish fellow,' said Greene, 'to go and say things like that! A great age! The Elizabethan – a great age?'

'So, my dear Lord,' Greene continued, sitting comfortably in his chair, holding the wine-glass between his fingers, 'we must make the best of it, cherish the past and honor those writers who write not for pay but for glory. If only I had a pension of three hundred pounds a year, paid quarterly, I would live for the poetry and fine writing alone. But it's necessary to have a pension to do it.'

By this time Orlando had lost all hope of discussing his own work with the poet. The talk now moved on to the lives and characters of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and the rest, all of whom Greene had known personally and about whom he had a thousand funny stories to tell. These were his gods, and Orlando had never laughed so much in his life.

So time passed, and Orlando felt for his guest a strange mixture of liking and contempt, of admiration and pity, of fear and fascination. He talked only about himself all the time, yet was such good company that one could listen to his stories for ever. Then he was so witty; then he was so irreverent; then he was so free; then he was so full of strange ideas in his head. He could make salad in three hundred different ways; knew all about mixing wines; played several musical instruments, and was the first person, and perhaps the last, to fry cheese in the great marble fireplace. The fact that he did not know many other common things amazed Orlando who had never met anybody of his kind before. Even the maids laughed at his jokes, and the servants stayed in the room to hear his stories. Indeed, the house had never been so lively as now that he was there. This gave Orlando much to think about and to compare this way of life with the old. In the end, he came to the conclusion that he had invited to his house a spirit of unrest that would never let him sleep well again.

At the same moment, Nick Greene came to quite the opposite conclusion. Lying in bed on the softest pillows between the smoothest sheets, he thought that he needed to escape somehow. Getting up, dressing and hearing the fountains fall, he thought that unless he could hear the roar of the cobbled streets, he would never write another line. If this goes on much longer, he thought, hearing the servants lay the table with silver dishes, I will fall asleep and die.

So he found Orlando in his room, and explained that he had not been able to sleep all night because of the silence. Indeed, the house was surrounded by a park and a wall. Silence, he said, was bad for his nerves. He wanted to end his visit that very morning. Orlando felt some relief at this, yet also a great reluctance to let him go. The house, he thought, would seem very dull without him. As the poet was leaving, Orlando dared give him his play and ask his opinion of it. The poet took it; he started muttering something about ambition when Orlando interrupted him by promising to pay the pension quarterly.

The great hall had never seemed so large and so empty when the poet went away. Orlando knew that he would never have the courage to fry cheese in the marble fireplace again. He would never have the wit to tell jokes about Italian pictures; never have the skill to mix punch as it should be mixed. Yet what a relief, what a luxury to be alone once more, after these six weeks.

Upon return, Nick Greene found things going on much as he had left them. Mrs. Greene was giving birth to a baby in one room; Tom Fletcher^[38] was drinking gin in another. Books were lying on the floor; dinner was set on a table where the children had been playing with mud. But this, Greene felt, was the atmosphere for writing; here he could write, and so he did. The subject was made for him. A noble Lord at home. A Visit to a Nobleman was the title of his new poem. It was a very spirited satire. It was done so that no one could doubt that the young Lord in the poem was Orlando. And if there had been any doubt about it, Greene added some passages from Orlando's play, which he found extremely wordy.

The booklet was soon printed and sent by friends to Orlando himself. When he had read it, which he did quietly and calmly from start to finish, he called his servant and told him to drop the document in the filthiest mud on the estate. Then he added that he wanted to buy two fine dogs.

'Because I have done with men', he said.

Yet, he paid the pension quarterly.

Thus, at the age of thirty, the young nobleman had not only had every experience that life has to offer, but had seen the worthlessness of them all. Love and ambition, women and poets were all vain. The night after reading Greene's Visit to a Nobleman, he burnt fifty-seven of his works, keeping only ' The Oak Tree', which was his boyish dream and very short. Two things he could still trust: dogs and nature. So he called his dogs to him and walked through the park.

He had been alone for so long, writing and reading in his room, that he had almost forgotten the pleasures of nature, which can be great in June. When he reached that high hilltop from where on fine days half of England and some of Wales and Scotland could be seen, he dropped down under his favorite oak tree and felt that if he never spoke to another man or woman as long as he lived, if he never met a poet or a Princess again, he would still live quite happily.

Here he came then – day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. He saw the young ferns grow; he saw the green leaves turn golden; he saw the moon rise and the sun set; he saw how spring follows winter and autumn summer; how night follows day and day night; he saw a storm and then fine weather; he saw how things stayed the same for two or three hundred years. Time passed and nothing whatsoever happened.

But Time, which makes animals and plants bloom and fade, unfortunately, has no such simple effect on the mind of man. The mind of man has a strange effect on the time. There is a big difference between time on the clock and time in the mind. An hour may become fifty or a hundred years in one's mind; on the other hand, an hour may seem as one second. When a man has reached the age of thirty, as Orlando now had, time when he is thinking becomes unusually long; and time when he is acting becomes unusually short. Thus Orlando gave his orders and did his business in a second; but when he was alone on the hilltop under the oak tree, the seconds became years.

What is love? What is friendship? What is truth? In such thinking he spent months and years of his life. Human life ages long, though some say that it is shorter than the fall of a rose leaf to the ground. He would go out after breakfast a man of thirty and come home to dinner a man of fifty-five. Some weeks added a century to his age, others no more than three seconds. Life seemed to Orlando to be unnaturally long. Yet, it went like a flash, and not even the first question – What is love? – had been answered. So the other questions, such as What one lives for,