Turning back to Stedman’s earlier book, the “Victorian Poets,” one finds many a terse passage, as where he describes Landor as a “royal Bohemian in art,” or compares the same author’s death in Florence at ninety, a banished man, to “the death of some monarch of the forest, most untamed when powerless.” Such passages redeem a book from the danger of being forgotten, but they cannot in the long run save it from the doom which awaits too great diffuseness in words. During all this period of hard work, he found room also for magazine articles, always thoroughly done. Nowhere is there a finer analysis, on the whole, of the sources of difficulty in Homeric translation than will be found in Stedman’s review of Bryant’s translation of Homer, and nowhere a better vindication of a serious and carefully executed book (“Atlantic Monthly,” May, 1872). He wrote also an admirable volume of lectures on the “Nature and Elements of Poetry” for delivery at Johns Hopkins University. As years went on, our correspondence inevitably grew less close. On March 10, 1893, he wrote, “I am so driven at this season, ‘let alone’ financial worries, that I have to write letters when and where I can.” Then follows a gap of seven years; in 1900 his granddaughter writes on October 25, conveying affectionate messages from him; two years after, April 2, 1903, he writes himself in the same key, then adds, “Owing to difficulties absolutely beyond my control, I have written scarcely a line for myself since the Yale bicentennial [1901]”; and concludes, “I am very warmly your friend and kinsman.” It was a full, easy, and natural communication, like his old letters; but it was four years later when I heard from him again as follows, in a letter which I will not withhold, in spite of what may be well regarded as its over-sensitiveness and somewhat exaggerated tone. 2643 Broadway, NEW YORK CITY, Evening, March 20th, 1907. MY DEAR KINSMAN,—Although I have given you no reason to be assured of it, you are still just the same to me in my honor and affection—you are never, and you never have been, otherwise in my thoughts than my kinsman (by your first recognition of our consanguinity) and my friend; yes, and early teacher, for I long ago told you that it was your essays that confirmed me, in my youth, in the course I chose for myself.