306
��NOTES BY THE WAY.
��Traill's
parody of
' Sister
Helen.'
��Sleep ' from ' The House of Life ' for ever. There is always to be remembered that in lapse of years the best poets drift into very diverse regions of thought, and the oldening man loses sympathy with his former self. As Shakespeare the omniscient sings, 'Crabbed age and youth cannot live together.' No, not in the mind of the same pronounced individual. Alexander Smith and his true teacher, the still living and unstained Philip James Bailey, concede that ' we must count time by heart throbs.' Rossetti thus con- sidered was a veritable patriarch when he took that overdose of chloral at the Birchington bungalow .... To my mind D. G. R. ' Sister Helen ' is knocked to pieces and sent to smithereens by the later annexations, prolongations, and unutterable drearinesses. Do you know H. D. Traill's stupendously comic parody of the ' Sister Helen ' ? if not so, tell me, and I will transcribe it from his delightful volume of ' Recaptured Rhymes,' 1882."
��1901, Dec. 17.
F. W.
Robinson.
��F. W. ROBINSON.
" Think how honest and true, how thoroughly wholesome and clean, was the work of F. W. Robinson, whose career is newly closed, after a long course of blameless and invigorating fiction. . . . I read a few days ago in the Christmas number ' Holly Leaves * a delightful little story by him, ' Rescued by a Woman,' a tramway-car incident of a wet-day adventure, told in an unaffected and convincing manner, ending happily, such as Charles Dickens would have been proud to have owned, as being in his best spirit and manner ; and this was F. W. R.'s latest story. Nearly all of his voluminous works I have read with pleasure during these forty-five years, serially beginning with ' Anne Judge, Spinster,' in CasselVs Magazine ; and although, of course, some of his half- hundred were inferior to others, there was never one that was not sound at heart and honourable, never a page that, ' dying, he might wish to blot.' Some few, at least, deserve continuance of life and grateful memory. His own distinct personality, so devoid of the silly and obtrusive egotism and boastfulness nowadays disgustingly apparent, enhances the charm of all that he revealed of his inner life and charitable outlook."
��1902, Feb. 22. Byron.
��BYRON.
" Whatever faults and mistakes marred the social and moral life of Byron, and also whatever flaws there were in his workman- ship, he was nevertheless, by nature a far nobler man than Pope, and his best admirers love his best work better than ever he himself unselfishly loved and praised the writings of the author of ' The Dunciad.' In fact, his admiration for the satires led him on a
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