F. T. to W. M.:—

"I have been wondering what criticisms had appeared on Mrs. Meynell. I have seen none, except the Fortnightly and the Chronicle. Coventry all abroad about her poetry, Le Gallienne all abroad about her prose. But the latter's notice of her poetry showed real perception. Coventry was excellent with regard to the side of her prose which he had seized; but rather provoking for seizing it, since he has sent the Chronicle off after him on what is a false trail. The side is there; but it is not the prominent side, and certainly not the side most markedly characteristic of her."

C. P. to F. T.:—

"Lymington, July 29, 1895.

"My dear Thompson,—I am glad you think as I do about those 'wonderful verses' (A. M.'s). I have quoted your words in a letter I have written to our Friend. They will delight her greatly. . . .

"It is good news that you are writing prose. You know how perfectly great I think what I have read of your prose. After all, the greatest things must be said in prose. Music is too weak to follow the highest thought. I will try and go to Pantasaph as soon as I have arranged some engagements which have come into the foreground since I wrote to you.

"I hear that Traill and Henley (who abused your first Book) are in raptures (should they not be written ruptures?) with the last!

"When will the 'critics' understand the difference between an ounce of diamond dust and a diamond that weighs an ounce! These gentlemen have written almost nothing about Rod, Root, and Flower. I suppose they can make nothing of it. But Bell tells me it sells fairly.—Yours ever,

Coventry Patmore."

Thompson himself adopted the view that Sister Songs lacked a proper sequence of idea and incident, or rather that, to the unready reader, it apparently lacked such sequence.

Mr. Arnold Bennett's "Don't say I didn't tell you," saved fortunately from the flimsy pages of Woman, July 3, 1895, reads proudly now:—

"I declare that for three days after this book appeared I read nothing else. I went about repeating snatches of it—snatches such as—

The innocent moon, that nothing does but shine,
Moves all the labouring surges of the world.

My belief is that Francis Thompson has a richer natural genius, a finer poetical equipment, than any poet save Shakespeare. Show me the divinest glories of Shelley and Keats, even of Tennyson, who wrote the 'Lotus Eaters' and the songs in 'The Princess,' and I think I can match them all out of this one book, this little book that can be bought at an ordinary bookseller's shop for an ordinary, prosaic crown. I fear that in thus extolling Francis Thompson's work, I am grossly outraging the canons of criticism. For the man is alive, he gets up of a morning like common mortals, not improbably he eats bacon for breakfast; and every critic with an atom of discretion knows that a poet must not be called great until he is either dead or very old. Well, please yourself what you think. But, in time to come, don't say I didn't tell you."

Mr. Arnold Bennett was to discover for himself the secret of large sales: he did not negotiate them for his poet, who complained of "my ill-starred volume—which has sold only 349 copies in twelve months." Bad enough, of course; but poets of distinction have since then been contented, or discontented, with the sale of thirty in the same interval. New Poems did much worse.