orld to me. I wrote to him full of my
enthusiasm; and, though I heard nothing then in reply, I find among my
books a copy of _The Unknown Eros_ with this inscription: 'Arthur
Symons, from Coventry Patmore, July 23, 1890.'

The date is the date of his sixty-seventh birthday, and the book was
given to me after a birthday-dinner at his house at Hastings, when, I
remember, a wreath of laurel had been woven in honour of the occasion,
and he had laughingly, but with a quite naive gratification, worn it for
a while at the end of dinner. He was one of the very few poets I have
seen who could wear a laurel wreath and not look ridiculous.

In the summer of that year I undertook to look after the _Academy_ for a
few weeks (a wholly new task to me) while Mr. Cotton, the editor, went
for a holiday. The death of Cardinal Newman occurred just then, and I
wrote to Patmore, asking him if he would do an obituary notice for me.
He replied, in a letter dated August 13, 1890:

I should have been very glad to have complied with your request,
had I felt myself at all able to do the work effectively; but my
acquaintance with Dr. Newman was very slight, and I have no sources
of knowledge about his life, but such as are open to all. I have
never taken much interest in contemporary Catholic history and
politics. There are a hundred people who could do what you want
better than I could, and I can never stir my lazy soul to take up
the pen, unless I fancy that I have something to say which makes it
a matter of conscience that I should say it.

Failing Patmore, I asked Dr. Greenhill, who was then living at Hastings,
and Patmore wrote on August 16:

Dr. Greenhill will do your work far better than I could have done
it. What an intellect we have lost in Newman--so delicately capable
of adjustment that it could crush a Hume or crack a Kingsley! And
what an example both in literature and in life. But that we have
not lost.

Patmore's memory was retentive of good phrases which had once come up
under his pen, as that witty phrase about crushing and cracking had come
up in the course of a brief note scribbled on a half-sheet of paper.
The phrase reappears five years afterwards, elaborated into an
impressive sentence, in the preface to _The Rod, the Root, and the
Flower_, dated Lymington, May 1895:

The steam-hammer of that intellect which could be so delicately