which true poets, great or small, know—that fine despair which, while it will sometimes stop the breath of one of the true sons of Apollo, as it actually did strike mute Charles Wells, and as at one time it threatened to stop the breath of Rossetti, will lead others to write, and write, and write. It is, however, life’s illusions that in most cases make life tolerable. When in old age calamity came upon Hake, and he was shut out from life as by a prison wall, his one solace, the one thing that really bound him to life, was this ambitious dream which came upon the Bluecoat boy of eleven. His mother was in easy circumstances, and when a youth Hake travelled a good deal on the Continent, where his success in the “great world” of that time was swift and complete. If this success was owing as much to his exceptionally striking personal appearance and natural endowment of style as to his intellectual equipments—high as these were—that is not surprising to those who knew him. Of course he was well advanced in years before I was old enough to call him my friend; but even then he was so extremely handsome a man that I can well believe the stories I have got from his family connexions (such as his wife’s sisters) of his appearance in youth. With the single exception of Tennyson, he was the most poetical-looking poet I have ever seen. And circumstances put to the best uses his natural gift of style; for it was in the plastic period of his life that he met the best people on the Continent and in England. I suspect, indeed, that after the plastic period in a man’s life is passed it is not of much use for him to come into contact with what used to be called “the great world.” To be, or to seem to be, unconscious of one’s own bearing towards the world, and unconscious of the world’s bearing towards oneself, is, I fancy, impossible to a man—even though he have the genius and intellectual endowment of a Browning—who is for the first time brought into touch with society after the plastic period is passed. I have told elsewhere the whimsical story of Hake and Rossetti, of Rossetti’s delightful account of his reading as a boy, in a coffee-house in Chancery Lane, Hake’s remarkable romance ‘Vates,’ afterwards called ‘Valdarno,’ in a magazine; his writing a letter about it to the unknown author, and getting no reply until many years had passed. Hake’s relations towards Rossetti were of the deepest and most sacred kind. Rossetti had the highest opinion of Hake’s poetical genius, and also felt towards him the greatest love and gratitude for services of an inestimable kind rendered to him in the direst crisis of his life. To enter upon these matters, however, is obviously impossible in a brief and hurried obituary notice; and equally impossible is it for me to enter into the poetic principles of a writer whose very originality has been a barrier to his winning a wide recognition.