On finding that the public would listen to him, I urged him to bring out a volume of selected pieces from all his works, an idea which for some time he contested with his usual pessimistic vigour. Having, however, set my heart upon it, I spoke upon the subject to Mr. John Lane, who at once saw his way to bring out such a volume at his own risk. To the poet’s astonishment the book was a success, and it at once passed into a second edition. In the spring of this year he was emboldened to bring out another volume of new poems, and his name became firmly re-established as a poet. It was after the success of the first book that he consulted me upon a question which was then upon his mind: Should he devote his future energies to literature or to making himself a position as a speaker in the Lords? He had lately had occasion to speak both in the country and in the Lords upon some local matter of importance, and his success had in some slight degree revived an old aspiration to plunge into the world of politics. He was a Liberal, and in 1868 he had contested—but unsuccessfully—Mid-Cheshire. This was on the first election for that division after the Reform Act of 1867. His support in a county so Conservative as Cheshire had really been very strong, but he never made another effort to get into Parliament. “You know my way,” he used to say. “I can make one spring—perhaps a pretty good spring—but not more than one.” On the whole, he leaned towards the idea of going into politics. The way in which he put the case to me was thoroughly characteristic of him: “Even if my verse were strong and vital, which I fear it is not, there is almost no chance for men of my generation receiving more than a slight attention at the present day. Things have altogether changed since the sixties and seventies, when I published my most important work—at a time when the prominent names were Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne. The old critical oracles are now dumb; the reviewers are all young men whose knowledge of poetry does not go back so far as the sixties. Those who reviewed the selection from my work in Miles’s book showed themselves to be entirely unconscious of the name of Leicester Warren, and treated the poems there selected as being the work of a new writer; and even when the poems published by Lane came out, no one seemed to be aware that they were by a writer who was very much to the fore a quarter of a century ago. That book has had a flutter of success, but in how large a degree was the success owing to the curiosity excited by the book of a man of my generation being brought out now, and by the publisher of the men of this? With all my sympathy with the work of the younger men and my admiration of some of it, things, I say, have changed since those days.”