alleys for profit and the morbid
entertainment of the curious. His single failing in yielding to the
attraction of an insidious drug seemed to be impotent to affect his
high admirations and his clear perceptions in the regions of honor and
religion.

[Illustration:

Yea, faileth now even dream
The dreamer _Page 55_]

It is surely one of the literary glories of a distinguished family that
Mr. and Mrs. Meynell succeeded in helping Thompson to emancipate
himself from the enslavement of a tyrannic habit. His poetic genius
began to flower in the new liberty. For the next ten years interest in
his poetry and literary friends and connections, few and select, made
his life comparatively happy. But he maintained a large measure of
independence to the last. That he was never ungrateful to those who
befriended him, his poems are ample proof. But in London he always had
his own lodgings in a cheap but respectable quarter of the city. His
unpunctual and preoccupied manner sometimes created small distresses
for his devoted friends to relieve. During the last ten years of his
life he wrote little poetry. His vitality, never vigorous, was ebbing
and unequal to the demands of inspired verse. But during these years
of decline he wrote much golden prose. He was a regular and highly
valued contributor to the _Academy_, the _Athenaeum_, the _Nation_, and
the _Daily Chronicle_. One can hardly fail to be impressed by the mere
industry of a writer of reputed slack habits of work. The published
volume of his selected essays is literary criticism, as learned and
allusive as Matthew Arnold's, and as nicely poised, with the advantage
of being poised in more rarified heights than Arnold's wings could hope
to scale. In this book is his classic and most wonderful essay on
Shelley, written before his strength began to flag, in which prose
seems to be carried off its feet, as it were, in a very storm of poetic
impulse. The published essays are not a tithe of Thompson's writings
for the press. Moreover, we have a study of Blessed John de la Salle,
a little volume on "Health and Holiness," and a large "Life of St.
Ignatius Loyola," none of them suggesting even remotely the plantigrade
writing of the mechanical hack.

During the last year of his life, when consumption had almost
completely undermined resistance, his old habit reasserted its empire.
But it was not for long, and can hardly be said to have hastened the
end, which