suggestions of riot. They will see only a literary affectation, where
in truth there is as genuine a note of personal sincerity as in the
more explicit and arranged confessions of less admirable poets. Yes, in
these few evasive, immaterial snatches of song, I find, implied for the
most part, hidden away like a secret, all the fever and turmoil and the
unattained dreams of a life which had itself so much of the swift,
disastrous, and suicidal impetus of genius.

Ernest Christopher Dowson was born at The Grove, Belmont Hill, Lee, Kent,
on August 2nd, 1867; he died at 26 Sandhurst Gardens, Catford, S.E., on
Friday morning, February 23, 1900, and was buried in the Roman Catholic
part of the Lewisham Cemetery on February 27. His great-uncle was Alfred
Domett, Browning's "Waring," at one time Prime Minister of New Zealand, and
author of "Ranolf and Amohia," and other poems. His father, who had himself
a taste for literature, lived a good deal in France and on the Riviera, on
account of the delicacy of his health, and Ernest had a somewhat irregular
education, chiefly out of England, before he entered Queen's College,
Oxford. He left in 1887 without taking a degree, and came to London, where
he lived for several years, often revisiting France, which was always his
favourite country. Latterly, until the last year of his life, he lived
almost entirely in Paris, Brittany, and Normandy. Never robust, and always
reckless with himself, his health had been steadily getting worse for some
years, and when he came back to London he looked, as indeed he was, a dying
man. Morbidly shy, with a sensitive independence which shrank from any
sort of obligation, he would not communicate with his relatives, who would
gladly have helped him, or with any of the really large number of attached
friends whom he had in London; and, as his disease weakened him more and
more, he hid himself away in his miserable lodgings, refused to see a
doctor, let himself half starve, and was found one day in a Bodega with
only a few shillings in his pocket, and so weak as to be hardly able to