al verses which helped to make up the
collection published in the following year under the title _Underwoods_.
In the early autumn of the same year, 1886, he took a longer and more
successful excursion from home than usual, staying without breakdown for
two or three weeks at the Monument, as he always called my house at the
British Museum, and seeing something of kindred spirits among his
elders, such as Robert Browning, James Russell Lowell, the painters
Burne-Jones and W. B. Richmond, and others who had hitherto delighted in
his work and now learned to delight no less in his society.

Thence he went with Mr. Henley for a short trip to Paris, chiefly in
order to see the sculptor Rodin and his old friends Mr. and Mrs. W. H.
Low. From this trip he returned none the worse, but during all the later
autumn and winter at Bournemouth was again hampered in his work by
renewed and prolonged attacks of illness. A further cause of trouble was
the distressing failure of his father's health and spirits, attended by
symptoms which plainly indicated the beginning of the end.

For some weeks of April, 1887, he was much taken up with a scheme which
had nothing to do with literature, and which the few friends to whom he
confided it regarded as wildly Quixotic and unwise. In these years he
had, as we have seen, taken deeply to heart both what he thought the
guilty remissness of Government action in the matter of the Soudan
garrisons and of Gordon, and the tameness of acquiescence with which the
national conscience appeared to take the result. He had been not less
disturbed at the failure, hitherto, of successive administrations to
assert the reign of law in Ireland. He was no blind partisan of the
English cause in that country, and had even written of the hereditary
hatred of Irish for English as a sentiment justified by the facts of
history. But he held strongly that private warfare, the use of dynamite
and the knife, with the whole system of agrarian vengeances and the
persecution of the weak, were means which no end could justify; and that
redress of grievances, whatever form it might ultimately take, must be
preceded by the re-establishment of law. In _More New Arabian Nights_,
published the year before, he had endeavoured "to make dynamite
ridiculous if he could not make it horrible," and to the old elements of
fantastic invention, and humorously solemn realism in the unreal, had
added the new element of a witty and scornful crimina