The Rev. Wm. Barnes, of Dorset dialect fame, is another memory; as also in years past the late Chevalier de Chatelain, a relative of my Norwood friend, Victor de Pontigny, a well-known musical authority.

No doubt I have corresponded with most of the literary men of my day, from Tennyson to—­well, I will not sound a bathos, but I do not publish private notes without permission, and in fact there would be no end of such printed amenities of literature battledored and shuttlecocked from one to another.  I may, however, mention as a good habit of mine (is it not a good one?) that, whenever I like a book, I take leave to thank its author, and have usually received, en revanche, warm letters of their gratitude from many, especially if young ones.  Surely it is proper in a veteran so to encourage a juvenile or even a mature brother, should he seem to deserve it.  As also, be it known, that sometimes I have taken up the pen faithfully and honestly to rebuke:  in these realistic and atheistic days there are some modern writers, both of prose and poetry, older or younger, who have reason to thank me for timely expostulations,—­if they have attended to my friendly strictures.

CHAPTER XLII.

POLITICAL.

Throughout my lengthened spell of life I never was anything of a zealous politician.  Well acquainted, as I have been, with many men of all manner of opinions, and having had much the schooling of Ulysses, who had “seen the cities of many men and had known their minds,” I know perfectly well that there are in every school of thought good men, and bad men too, whatever may be their alleged principles, and I am quite willing to believe in an honest man, and stand by him if need be.  In that spirit, for many years when I was a West Surrey voter (indeed I am so still), I used to give one of my votes to Briscoe, the Whig, and the other to Drummond, the Tory, because I knew and trusted both of them for upright men as well as personal friends, and they sat together as our Parliamentary representatives.  As a matter of course, nobody understood my duplex voting,—­for they were partisans and I was not,—­so in that as in some other matters I have always been a dark horse, quite independent, and of the broadgauge pattern rather than of the narrow.  For instance, having known him from youth to age, I do not even yet despair of Gladstone; though I have remained much where we both began, whilst he has gone down lower, step by step, to a zero of—­what is it?—­inverted ambition, whither I cannot willingly descend with him; and yet, I do not count him an enemy:  he follows his conscience, as I do mine.  Here was my judgment of the Man thirty years since, printed in No. 53 of my “Three Hundred Sonnets”: