Among the many laudatory notices that appeared at the time, there is an extract from a review of the work taken from a great London paper and quoted by a French writer which is worth reprinting as showing the attitude of the press towards the poem. "The whole is awful as the pages of Sophocles. That he has rendered with his fine art so much of the essence of his life and the life of others in that inferno to the sensitive is a memorable thing for the social scientist, but a much more memorable thing for literature. This is a simple, a poignant, a great ballad, one of the greatest in the English language." Never, perhaps, since Gray's "Elegy" had a poem been so revised, pruned and polished over and over again as this cry from a prison cell. The publisher was driven to the verge of distraction by the constant alterations and emendations, the placing of a comma had become a matter of moment to the fastidious author, but the work was published in its entirety save for two or three stanzas concerning one of the prison officials that it was deemed wise to suppress. The poem bears the dedication-- IN MEMORIAM C. T. W. Sometime Trooper of the Royal Horse Guards Obiit, H.M. Prison, Reading, Berkshire July 7th, 1896. The case of the trooper to whose memory the work is dedicated excited a good deal of interest at the time. He had a fit of jealousy, murdered his sweetheart, and though public opinion was inclined to take a merciful view of the crime, and a petition was presented to the Home Secretary for the withdrawal of the capital sentence, it was without effect, and the extreme penalty of the law was carried out in the Gaol at Reading. The first line-- "He did not wear his scarlet coat"-- rivets the attention at once, and as surely as do the opening lines of "The Ancient Mariner." The reason for this is given at once-- "For wine and blood are red And blood and wine were on his hands When they found him with the dead." That the whole incident that led to the man's being there should be communicated in the very first stanza, to make that stanza complete, is an artistic necessity, and in the next two lines we are told who the victim is-- "The poor dead woman whom he loved, And murdered in her bed."