, in _Studies in Two Literatures_. But I should like to supplement
these various studies by a few supplementary notes, and the discussion
of a few points, chiefly technical, connected with his art as a poet. I
knew Patmore only during the last ten years of his life, and never with
any real intimacy; but as I have been turning over a little bundle of
his letters, written with a quill on greyish-blue paper, in the fine,
careless handwriting which had something of the distinction of the
writer, it seems to me that there are things in them characteristic
enough to be worth preserving.

The first letter in my bundle is not addressed to me, but to the friend
through whom I was afterwards to meet him, the kindest and most helpful
friend whom I or any man ever had, James Dykes Campbell. Two years
before, when I was twenty-one, I had written an _Introduction to the
Study of Browning_. Campbell had been at my elbow all the time,
encouraging and checking me; he would send back my proof-sheets in a
network of criticisms and suggestions, with my most eloquent passages
rigorously shorn, my pet eccentricities of phrase severely straightened.
At the beginning of 1888 Campbell sent the book to Patmore. His opinion,
when it came, seemed to me, at that time, crushing; it enraged me, I
know, not on my account, but on Browning's. I read it now with a clearer
understanding of what he meant, and it is interesting, certainly, as a
more outspoken and detailed opinion on Browning than Patmore ever
printed.

MY DEAR MR. CAMPBELL,--I have read enough of Mr. Arthur Symons'
clever book on Browning to entitle me to judge of it as well as if
I had read the whole. He does not seem to me to be quite qualified,
as yet, for this kind of criticism. He does not seem to have
attained to the point of view from which all great critics have
judged poetry and art in general. He does not see that, in art, the
style in which a thing is said or done is of more importance than
the thing said or done. Indeed, he does not appear to know what
style means. Browning has an immense deal of mannerism--which in
art is always bad;--he has, in his few best passages, manner, which
as far as it goes is good; but of style--that indescribable
reposeful 'breath of a pure and unique individuality'--I recognise
no trace, though I find it distinctly enough in almost every other
English poet who has obtained so d