adjusted to its task as to be capable of either crushing a Hume or
cracking a Kingsley is no longer at work, that tongue which had the
weight of a hatchet and the edge of a razor is silent; but its
mighty task of so representing truth as to make it credible to the
modern mind, when not interested in unbelief, has been done.

In the same preface will be found a phrase which Mr. Gosse quotes from a
letter of June 17, 1888, in which Patmore says that the reviewers of his
forthcoming book, _Principle in Art_, 'will say, or at least feel, "Ugh,
Ugh! the horrid thing! It's alive!" and think it their duty to set their
heels on it accordingly.' By 1895 the reviewers were replaced by
'readers, zealously Christian,' and the readers, instead of setting
their heels on it, merely 'put aside this little volume with a cry.'

I find no more letters, beyond mere notes and invitations, until the end
of 1893, but it was during these years that I saw Patmore most often,
generally when I was staying with Dykes Campbell at St. Leonards. When
one is five-and-twenty, and writing verse, among young men of one's own
age, also writing verse, the occasional companionship of an older poet,
who stands aside, in a dignified seclusion, acknowledged, respected, not
greatly loved or, in his best work at least, widely popular, can hardly
fail to be an incentive and an invigoration. It was with a full sense of
my privilege that I walked to and fro with Coventry Patmore on that high
terrace in his garden at Hastings, or sat in the house watching him
smoke cigarette after cigarette, or drove with him into the country, or
rowed with him round the moat of Bodiam Castle, with Dykes Campbell in
the stern of the boat; always attentive to his words, learning from him
all I could, as he talked of the things I most cared for, and of some
things for which I cared nothing. Yes, even when he talked of politics,
I listened with full enjoyment of his bitter humour, his ferocious
gaiety of onslaught; though I was glad when he changed from Gladstone to
St. Thomas Aquinas, and gladder still when he spoke of that other
religion, poetry. I think I never heard him speak long without some
reference to St. Thomas Aquinas, of whom he has written so often and
with so great an enthusiasm. It was he who first talked to me of St.
John of the Cross, and when, eight years later, at Seville, I came upon
a copy of the first edition of the _Obras Espirituales_ on a