Over thirty years ago I was requested by Mr. Bertram Dobell, Thomson’s friend and literary executor, to write a Life of the poet; and in the preparation of that work, which involved a good deal of search for scattered letters and other biographical material, I was brought into touch not only with many personal friends of Thomson, such as Mr. Charles Bradlaugh, Mr. G. W. Foote, Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Wright, Mrs. H. Bradlaugh Bonner, Mr. J. W. Barrs, Mr. Charles Watts, and Mr. Percy Holyoake, but also with some well-known writers, among them Mr. George Meredith, Mr. Swinburne, Mr. Watts-Dunton, Mr. W. M. Rossetti, and Mr. William Sharp. I was impressed by the warm regard in which Thomson’s memory was held by those who had known him, the single exception being a sour old landlady in a gloomy London street, of whose remarks I took note as an instance of the strangely vague views held in some quarters as to the function of a biographer. She could give me no information about her impecunious lodger, except that he had “passed away”; but she added that if I wished to write the Life of a good man, a real Christian, and a total abstainer--here she looked at me dubiously, as if questioning my ability to carry out her suggestion--there was her dear departed husband! In another case an old friend of Thomson’s, who told me many interesting facts about his early life, detained me just as I was taking my departure, and said in a meditative way, as if anxious to recall even the veriest trifle: “I think I remember that Jimmy once wrote a poem on some subject or other.” What he imagined to be my object in writing a Life of an obscure Army schoolmaster, except that he _had_ written a poem, I did not discover; perhaps the idea was that the biographer goes about, like the lion, seeking whom he may devour.