“My dear--The Hound is a Mongrel. I know him of old and have more than once driven him from my door. Several friends have endeavoured to persuade me that he was of the true breed but I would have none of him and will not now. Upon the provocation of your letter I read the thing again and most gladly and willingly share your symptoms of senile decay. The fabric of it I take to be pure fustian. And there is not a line in it that does not debauch the language it employs; not a phrase in it that does not seem to me to vulgarize by its expression whatever innocent thought may underlie it. The more I ponder over the great verse which time has left impregnable, the more I am impressed by the true poet’s unfailing reverence for the sanctity of words in their relation to sense and by his stern rejection of all melody that is not rooted there: the tinkling cadence of an obvious tune is not for him. His purpose might be taken to be no other than to express in final simplicity the thought that is in him. Why it is, or how it is, that in this process he achieves a result, in which the sense of beauty banishes all remembrance of intellectual origin--that is the poet’s secret: the mystery and the mastery of his craft. But I am getting into depths that cannot be plumbed on this tiny sheet of paper. It is the old subject of many a long night’s talk with you and concerns matters in which I think you and I are of accord.... As to Electra (Richard Strauss’ opera) of course I have no right to plead before that tribunal; but the terms in which it is praised make me suspect it is not praiseworthy. Yours ever, J. W. COMYNS CARR.” In relation to the above I cannot refrain from quoting an appreciation of my husband written some little while later by the late Theodore Watts Dunton. He had asked for news of his old friend after his first serious illness, and the following passage occurs in his acknowledgment of the reply: “Although he belongs to a later generation than mine, he and I are as intimate as brothers and I deeply prize the intimacy. There is no man on this earth whom I love more. Moreover I have always asserted that he is a man of genius--a true poet, with wings clipped, for the present, by the conditions of life.” As his intimates know, Charles Dickens was one of the brightest stars in my husband’s firmament. During all the years of our marriage, I never remember him without a volume of Dickens and one of Boswell’s _Life of Johnson_ beside his bed. Many a “night’s talk” with the life-long friend to whom he wrote as above had been devoted to ineffectual attempts to converting him to a real appreciation of Dickens--attempts which, as the following letters show, were finally successful. “MY DEAR,----