K. S. was to Eton and Cambridge. This
measure of success was not calculated to displease our alumnus
addictissimus.
Friendship and love, he said, made the summer of 1892 very happy to
him. I last heard from him in the summer of 1893, when he sent me
some of his most pleasing verses. He was in Scotland; he had
wandered back, a shadow of himself, to his dear St. Andrews. I
conceived that he was better; he said nothing about his health. It
is not easy to quote from his letters to his friend, Mr. Wallace,
still written in his beautiful firm hand. They are too full of
affectionate banter: they also contain criticisms on living poets:
he shows an admiration, discriminating and not wholesale, of Mr.
Kipling's verse: he censures Mr. Swinburne, whose Jacobite song (as
he wrote to myself) did not precisely strike him as the kind of
thing that Jacobites used to sing.
They certainly celebrated
`The faith our fathers fought for,
The kings our fathers knew,'
in a different tone in the North.
The perfect health of mind, in these letters of a dying man, is
admirable. Reading old letters over, he writes to Miss -, `I have
known a wonderful number of wonderfully kind-hearted people.
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