's work is to be found in every number of _The
Debater_--usually verse as well as prose. Both Fordham and Oldershaw
remember most vividly the effect of reading a fanciful essay on
Dragons in the first number. "The Dragon," it began, "is the most
cosmopolitan of impossibilities." And the boys, rolling the words on
their tongues, murmured to one another, "This is literature."

Except for a very occasional flash the one element not yet visible in
these _Debater_ essays is humour. This is curious, because some of
his most brilliant fooling belongs to the same period. In a
collection made after his death, _The Coloured Lands_ is an
illustrated jeu d'esprit of 1891, _Half Hours in Hades:_ "an
elementary handbook of demonology" which is as amusing a thing as he
ever wrote. The drawings he made for it show specimens of the
evolution of various types of devil into various types of humans: the
devils themselves are carefully classified--the common or garden
serpent (Tentator Hortensis), the red devil (Diabolus Mephistopheles)
the blue devil (Caeruleus Lugubrius) etc. Mr. J. Milton's "specimen"
is discussed and various methods of pursuing observations in
supernatural history which "possesses an interest which will remain
after health, youth and even life have departed."

There is nothing of this kind in _The Debater_. Besides the
historical soliloquies mentioned in the letter to Bentley, there are
poems in which he is beginning to feel after his religious
philosophy. One of these in a very early number shows considerable
power for a boy not yet seventeen.

ADVENIAT REGNUM TUUM

Not that the widespread wings of wrong brood o'er a moaning earth,
Not from the clinging curse of gold, the random lot of birth;
Not from the misery of the weak, the madness of the strong,
Goes upward from our lips the cry, "How long, oh Lord, how long?"
Not only from the huts of toil, the dens of sin and shame,
From lordly halls and peaceful homes the cry goes up the same;
Deep in the heart of every man, where'er his life be spent,
There is a noble weariness, a holy discontent.
Where'er to mortal eyes has come, in silence dark and lone,
Some glimmer of the far-off light the world has never known,
Some ghostly echoes from a dream of earth's triumphal song,
Then as the vision fades we cry, "How long, oh Lord, how long?"
Long ages, from the dawn of time, men's toiling march has wound
Towards the world they ev