I asked rather nervously if he didn’t think Keats had more or less held his own against the drawbacks of time and place. He admitted that there were ‘passages in Keats,’ but did not specify them. Of ‘the older men,’ as he called them, he seemed to like only Milton. ‘Milton,’ he said, ‘wasn’t sentimental.’ Also, ‘Milton had a dark insight.’ And again, ‘I can always read Milton in the reading-room.’ ‘The reading-room?’ ‘Of the British Museum. I go there every day.’ ‘You do? I’ve only been there once. I’m afraid I found it rather a depressing place. It--it seemed to sap one’s vitality.’ ‘It does. That’s why I go there. The lower one’s vitality, the more sensitive one is to great art. I live near the Museum. I have rooms in Dyott Street.’ ‘And you go round to the reading-room to read Milton?’ ‘Usually Milton.’ He looked at me. ‘It was Milton,’ he certificatively added, ‘who converted me to Diabolism.’ ‘Diabolism? Oh yes? Really?’ said I, with that vague discomfort and that intense desire to be polite which one feels when a man speaks of his own religion. ‘You--worship the Devil?’ Soames shook his head. ‘It’s not exactly worship,’ he qualified, sipping his absinthe. ‘It’s more a matter of trusting and encouraging.’ ‘Ah, yes.... But I had rather gathered from the preface to “Negations” that you were a--a Catholic.’ ‘Je l’etais a cette epoque. Perhaps I still am. Yes, I’m a Catholic Diabolist.’ This profession he made in an almost cursory tone. I could see that what was upmost in his mind was the fact that I had read ‘Negations.’ His pale eyes had for the first time gleamed. I felt as one who is about to be examined, viva voce, on the very subject in which he is shakiest. I hastily asked him how soon his poems were to be published. ‘Next week,’ he told me. ‘And are they to be published without a title?’ ‘No. I found a title, at last. But I shan’t tell you what it is,’ as though I had been so impertinent as to inquire. ‘I am not sure that it wholly satisfies me. But it is the best I can find. It suggests something of the quality of the poems.... Strange growths, natural and wild, yet exquisite,’ he added, ‘and many-hued, and full of poisons.’ I asked him what he thought of Baudelaire. He uttered the snort that was his laugh, and ‘Baudelaire,’ he said, ‘was a bourgeois malgre lui.’ France had had only one poet: Villon; ‘and two-thirds of Villon were sheer journalism.’ Verlaine was ‘an epicier malgre lui.’ Altogether, rather to my surprise, he rated French literature lower than English. There were ‘passages’ in Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. But ‘I,’ he summed up, ‘owe nothing to France.’ He nodded at me. ‘You’ll see,’ he predicted.