You, moreover, although you are but the half of Menander,
Lover of diction pure, with the first have a place—and with reason.
Would that vigor as well to your gentle writing were added.
So your comic force would in equal glory have rivaled
Even the Greeks themselves, though now you ignobly are vanquished.
Truly I sorrow and grieve that you lack this only, O Terence!


THOMAS HENRY HALL CAINE

(1853-)

Thomas Henry Hall Caine was born on the Isle of Man, of Manx and Cambrian parentage. He began his career as an architect in Liverpool, and made frequent contributions to the Builder and Building News. Acquiring a taste for literary work, he secured an engagement on the Liverpool Mercury, and shortly afterward formed an intimate friendship with Dante Gabriel Rossetti which was of incalculable benefit to the young writer, then twenty-five years of age. At eighteen he had already published a poem "of the mystical sort" under a pseudonym, and two years later he received £10 for writing the autobiography of some one else.

Hall Caine