confess, there is something infinitely
pathetic in that thought. We would fain shut our eyes, and open them
again at twenty years hence, with Mr. Sandys in the fulness of his
powers. It is not to be. What he might have become is hidden from us;
what he was we know. He was little more than a stripling when he
'burst upon the town' to be its marvel--and to die; a 'marvellous boy'
indeed; yet how unlike in character and in the nobility of his short
life, as in the mournful yet lovely circumstances of his death, to
that other Might-Have-Been who 'perished in his pride.' Our young men
of letters have travelled far since the days of Chatterton. Time was
when a riotous life was considered part of their calling--when they
shunned the domestic ties and actually held that the consummate artist
is able to love nothing but the creations of his fancy. It is such men
as Thomas Sandys who have exploded that pernicious fallacy....

"Whether his name will march down the ages is not for us, his
contemporaries, to determine. He had the most modest opinion of his
own work, and was humbled rather than elated when he heard it praised.
No one ever loved praise less; to be pointed at as a man of
distinction was abhorrent to his shrinking nature; he seldom, indeed,
knew that he was being pointed at, for his eyes were ever on the
ground. He set no great store by the remarkable popularity of his
works. 'Nothing,' he has been heard to say to one of those gushing
ladies who were his aversion, 'nothing will so certainly perish as the
talk of the town.' It may be so, but if so, the greater the pity that
he has gone from among us before he had time to put the coping-stone
upon his work. There is a beautiful passage in one of his own books in
which he sees the spirits of gallant youth who died too young for
immortality haunting the portals of the Elysian Fields, and the great
shades come to the portal and talk with them. We venture to say that
he is at least one of these."

What was the individuality behind the work? They discussed it in
leading articles and in the correspondence columns, and the man proved
to be greater than his books. His distaste for admiration is again and
again insisted on and illustrated by many characteristic anecdotes. He
owed much to his parents, though he had the misfortune to lose them
when he was but a child. "Little is known of his father, but we
understand that he was a retired military officer in easy
circumstances. T