Sharp himself was more inclined to the sonnet, as was our mutual friend, Theodore Watts (now Watts-Dunton), who lived with Swinburne at the Pines, Putney, and will always be remembered as Swinburne’s greatest friend. Watts’s sonnets in the Athenæum became as well known to literary people as Dr. Watts’s hymns. They were among the best sonnets of the day. Watts was Swinburne’s companion on his famous swimming excursions. Like the matchless poet who refused the laureateship, he was a magnificent swimmer.
Hall Caine was at that time the chief authority upon the sonnet, as he was one of the chief literary critics of the Athenæum and the Academy. He gave me about that time his Sonnets of Three Centuries, which I still keep.
Two other followers of the Muse who came to our parties were Mackenzie Bell and Norman Gale.
Adrian Ross—Arthur Reed Ropes—who so long carried on a dual literary life—a Fellow of King’s, an Examiner to the University, and writer of text-books at Cambridge, while he wrote the songs for George Edwardes’s musical comedies in London, was a friend of ours before he came to live in Addison Mansions, partly, I believe, because we lived there. He is an amazingly clever man; his general knowledge is extraordinary. He took various ’varsity scholarships and prizes at Cambridge and was the ablest of the clever journalists with whom Clement Shorter surrounded himself for his great move. He may also fairly claim to be W. S. Gilbert’s successor as a writer of really witty and scholarly songs (which have also been amazingly popular) for the principal musical comedies from A Greek Slave till the present day. Adrian Ross, who is a Russian by birth, looks like a Russian with his big, burly form, and fair beard and glasses, when you see him taking the chair at some feast of reason like the Omar Khayyam Club. He is one of the chief Omarians, and might, if he devoted himself to it, write just such a poem as Fitzgerald’s “Rubaiyat” himself, for he has the gift of form, the wit, and the width of knowledge, to draw upon. In the same way, if he had been born early enough, he would have written some of our best ballades and rondeaux. There, in addition to his extraordinary facility, he had the advantage of being one of the best-read men in England on French literature, and one of the chief authorities upon it. He married Ethel Wood, an actress as clever as she is pretty, who, if she acted more, would be one of our most successful character-actresses.
Rowland Thirlmere was another dual personality. When he came to see us at Addison Mansions he was Rowland Thirlmere the poet, literary to his finger-tips; when he was at home at Bury he was John Walker, a Lancashire cotton-mill manager, an ardent Conservative politician, a “Wake up, England!” man. Did he not write The Clash of Empires, a classic on the German peril?
Douglas Ainslie, the poet of the Stuarts, who has now established for himself a solid reputation in Philosophy, was still a diplomat when he first used to come to see us.
We had not so many poetesses. The chief of them was Lady Lindsay, whose In a Venetian Gondola went through many editions, a poetess of the same order and rank as the Hon. Mrs. Norton a generation before. Her poetry was strengthened by sincere piety and morality. They gave it the mysterious quality which attracts us in the old Sienese pictures.
Among the younger poetesses who came to us, two stood out—Ethel Clifford, Mrs. W. K. Clifford’s daughter, who married Fisher Dilke, and Marguerite Radclyffe-Hall.
The charm of Mrs. Dilke’s poetry is universally admitted, but Miss Hall’s has not yet received anything like the recognition which it deserves.
She is a step-daughter of the famous musician, Albert Visetti, and much younger than any of the others. To see her, even to speak with her, one would think that she thought more of her hunting-box and her horses than of abstractions like poetry. At the time when I first met her, her winters were equally divided between travelling and hunting, and she appears to have gathered inspiration from both of these sources. Her outdoor life in one of our most beautiful counties has given her a deep love and appreciation of the country pleasures only to be found in England. There is no one I know who writes more from inspiration. I reviewed her first book, ’Twixt Earth and Stars, with real enthusiasm. Since then she has published A Sheaf of Verses, Poems of the Past and Present, and Songs of Three Counties and Other Poems. Of these three volumes, Poems of the Past and Present shows her at her best.