ondon Irish Literary Society, attended its
committee meetings, and given lectures in London, in Dublin, and in
Belfast, on Irish novelists and Irish poetry, reading his lectures always,
and yet affecting his audience as I, with my spoken lectures, could not,
perhaps because Ireland had still the shape it had received from the
eighteenth century, and so felt the dignity, not the artifice, of his
elaborate periods. He was very little, and at a first glance he seemed
but a schoolboy of fifteen. I remember saying one night at the Rhymers',
when he spoke of passing safely, almost nightly, through Seven Dials, then
a dangerous neighbourhood, "Who would expect to find anything in your
pockets but a pegtop and a piece of string?" But one never thought of his
small stature when he spoke or read. He had the delicate strong features
of a certain filleted head of a Greek athlete in the British Museum, an
archaistic Graeco-Roman copy of a masterpiece of the fourth century, and
that resemblance seemed symbolic of the austere nobility of his verse. He
was now in his best years, writing with great ease and power; neither I,
nor, I think, any other, foresaw his tragedy.

He suffered from insomnia, and some doctor, while he was still at the
University, had recommended alcohol, and he had, in a vain hope of sleep,
increased the amount, as Rossetti had increased his doses of chloral, and
now he drank for drinking's sake. He drank a great deal too much, and,
though nothing could, it seemed, disturb his calm or unsteady his hand or
foot, his doctrine, after a certain number of glasses, would become more
ascetic, more contemptuous of all that we call human life. I have heard
him, after four or five glasses of wine, praise some church father who
freed himself from sexual passion by a surgical operation, and deny with
scorn, and much historical evidence, that a gelded man lost anything of
intellectual power. Even without stimulant his theology conceded nothing
to human weakness, and I can remember his saying with energy, "I wish
those people who deny the eternity of punishment could realise their
unspeakable vulgarity."

Now that I know his end, I see him creating, to use a favourite adjective
of his, "marmorean" verse, and believing the most terrible doctrines to
keep down his own turbulence. One image of that stay in Dublin is so clear
before me that it has blotted out most other images of that time. He is
sitting at a lodging-house table, wh