At Sligo, I was the social man where it was individual man that counted. It is a curious fact that entering this sombre house of stern preoccupation with business I for the first time in my life felt my self to be a free man, and that I was invited by the example of everyone around me to be my very self, thereby receiving the most important lesson in my life. The malady of puritanism is self-exaggeration, 'self-saturation' is the medical term. Even Shakespeare had experience of it, if we interpret as personal and literal the first line in one of his sonnets: 'Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye.' That is the malady, the excess, and there's plenty of it in puritan middle-class England, but the good side is that the puritan belongs to himself, whereas the votary of the religion of social enjoyment belongs to his neighbours and to society, so that not even on his death-bed can he return to himself. The Pollexfen charm was in their entire sincerity, John Pollexfen the seaman once told me, he was greatly troubled because it took him so long to make up his mind. Napoleon might have made a similar admission. This slow vacillation is always characteristic of entire sincerity. The man of society possesses a quick facility in making up his mind. He does not belong to himself, and the rules of society are written on his heart and brain. He is what is called well-bred. The individual man of entire sincerity has to wrestle with himself, unless transported by rage or passion; he has so much mind to make up, with none to help him and no guide except his conscience; and conscience after all, is but a feeble glimmer in a labyrinthine cavern of darkness. I think it was Shakespeare the poet, and not the thinking Shakespeare or the wise Shakespeare, who made that discovery about the importance of self-loyalty, for it is the root of every kind of poetical distinction, and without distinction poetry is of little avail. It is reported that Swinburne in some fit of petulance said that he and Shelley were better poets than anybody else because they were gentlemen. My criticism is that both these poets are lacking in the entire sincerity of the greatest poets, that because Keats has this entire sincerity he is better than either. I find, indeed, in Shelley and Swinburne activity, animation, eloquence. I find in Keats force as of mother nature. 'What man,' says the Bible, 'by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature?' Yet let any young poet stay for a while among the puritans and practise all the restraints of self-loyalty, and he will turn his sociable activity and animated sympathy into something which is much better, namely force. It is a foolish question, yet I wonder did Shakespeare undergo that kind of discipline?