t I own I am partly influenced by the fact that I have
settled to call my own vol. _Poems New and Old_, and don't
want it to get staled; but I really do think the other at
least as good for your purpose--perhaps more dignified.

Again, in reply to a proposal of my own, he wrote:

I think _Sonnets of the Century_ an excellent idea and
title. I must say a mass of Wordsworth over again, like
Main's, is a little disheartening,--still the _best_
selection from him is what one wants. There is some book
called _A Century of Sonnets_, but this, I suppose, would
not matter....

I think sometimes of your sonnet-book, and have formed
certain views. I really would not in your place include old
work at all: it would be but a scanty gathering, and I feel
certain that what is really in requisition is a supplement
to Main, containing living writers (printed and un-printed)
put together under their authors' names (not separately) and
rare gleanings from those more recently dead.

I fear I did not attach importance to this decision, for I now knew my
correspondent too well to rely upon his being entirely in the same mind
for long. Hence I was not surprised to receive the following a day or
two later:

I lately had a conversation with Watts about your sonnet-
book, and find his views to be somewhat different from what
I had expressed, and I may add I think now he is right. He
says there should be a very careful selection of the elder
sonnets and of everything up to present century. I think he
is right.

The fact is, that almost from the first I had taken a view similar to
Mr. Watts's as to the design of my book, and had determined to call the
anthology by the title it now bears. On one occasion, however, I acted
rather without judgment in sending Rossetti a synopsis of certain
critical tests formulated by Mr. Watts in a letter of great power and
value.

In the letter in question Mr. Watts seemed to be setting himself to
confute some extremely ill-considered remarks made in a certain quarter
upon the structure of the sonnet, where (following Macaulay) the critic
says that there exists no good reason for requiring that even the
conventional limit as to length should be observed, and that the only
use in art of the legitimate model is to "supply a poet with something
to do when his invention fails." I confess to having felt