o the work which has every merit but his own. Nor can he, when he is
conscious of its equality in technical skill, be expected to
discriminate between what is more or less valuable in his own work;
between, that is, his own greater or less degree of inspiration. And
here I may quote a letter which Patmore wrote to me, dated Lymington,
December 31, 1893, about a review of mine in which I had greeted him as
'a poet, one of the most essential poets of our time,' but had ventured
to say, perhaps petulantly, what I felt about a certain part of his
work.

I thank you for the copy of the _Athenaeum_, containing your
generous and well-written notice of 'Religio Poetae.' There is much
in it that must needs be gratifying to me, and nothing that I feel
disposed to complain of but your allusion to the 'dinner-table
domesticities of the "Angel in the House."' I think that you have
been a little misled--as almost everybody has been--by the
differing characters of the metres of the 'Angel' and 'Eros.' The
meats and wines of the two are, in very great part, almost
identical in character; but, in one case, they are served on the
deal table of the octo-syllabic quatrain, and, in the other, they
are spread on the fine, irregular rock of the free tetrameter.

In his own work he could see no flaw; he knew, better than any one, how
nearly it answered almost everywhere to his own intention; and of his
own intentions he could be no critic. It was from this standpoint of
absolute satisfaction with what he had himself done that he viewed other
men's work; necessarily, in the case of one so certain of himself, with
a measure of dissatisfaction. He has said in print fundamentally foolish
things about writers living and dead; and yet remains, if not a great
critic, at least a great thinker on the first principles of art. And, in
those days when I used to listen to him while he talked to me of the
basis of poetry, and of metres and cadences, and of poetical methods,
what meant more to me than anything he said, though not a word was
without its value, was the profound religious gravity with which he
treated the art of poetry, the sense he conveyed to one of his own
reasoned conception of its immense importance, its divinity.

It was partly, no doubt, from this reverence for his art that Patmore
wrote so rarely, and only under an impulse which could not be withstood.
Even his prose was writt