heless, on the
principle of 'Yet will I try the last,' I have added a few specimens of
it, with the off chance that one may be less poor than the rest.
Apologizing very sincerely for any intrusion on your valuable time, I
remain yours with little hope,

"Francis Thompson.

"Kindly address your rejection to the Charing Cross Post Office."

[Illustration:

Naked I wait Thy love's uplifted stroke!
..... smitten me to my knee;
I am defenceless utterly _Page 55_]

The unpromising aspect of the manuscript, thus introduced, was the
occasion of editorial neglect for some months. When at last Mr.
Meynell gave it his attention he was electrified into action. He wrote
to the address given by Thompson. The letter was returned from the
dead-letter office after many days. Then he published one of the poems
mentioned in the letter, "The Passion of Mary," in the hope that the
author would disclose his whereabouts. The plan succeeded and brought
a letter from Thompson with a new address. Mr. Meynell tried to waylay
him at the new address, a chemist's shop in Drury Lane, but with
characteristic shiftlessness the poet forgot to call there for possible
letters. But the seller of drugs finally established communications
between the editor and the poet, and one day, more than a year after
Thompson's first literary venture had been sent, he visited the office
of _Merry England_. Mr. Everard Meynell, the poet's biographer, thus
describes the entrance of the poet into his father's sanctum. "My
father was told that Mr. Thompson wished to see him. 'Show him up,' he
said, and was left alone. Then the door opened, and a strange hand was
thrust in. The door closed, but Thompson had not entered. Again it
opened, again it shut. At the third attempt a waif of a man came in.
No such figure had been looked for; more ragged and unkempt than the
average beggar, with no shirt beneath his coat and bare feet in broken
shoes, he found my father at a loss for words. 'You must have had
access to many books when you wrote that essay,' was what he said.
'That,' said Thompson, his shyness at once replaced by an acerbity that
afterwards became one of the most familiar of his never-to-be-resented
mannerisms, 'that is precisely where the essay fails. I had no books
by me at the time save Aeschylus and Blake.' There was little to be
done for him at that interview save the extraction of a promise to call
again. He made none of the con