Mr. Watts-Dunton has been well described by Mr. Coulson Kernahan as “a hero of friendship”; and his personal friendliness was shown not to distinguished writers only, but to any one whom he could encourage or help, nor did he take the least offence, however bluntly his own criticisms were criticized. In reviewing _The City of Dreadful Night_, on its first appearance in book form (1880), he had said that Thomson wrote in his pessimistic style “because now it is the fashion to be dreadful,” a denial of the sincerity of the poet to which I referred in my _Life of James Thomson_ as one of the strangest of misapprehensions. When I met Mr. Watts-Dunton, he alluded to this and other matters concerning Thomson so genially as to make me wonder how he could at times have written in so unsympathetic and unworthy a manner of authors whom he disliked. Admirers of Walt Whitman, in particular, had reason to resent the really disgusting things that were said of him; as when he was likened to a savage befouling the door-step of the civilized man. That Whitman himself must have been indignant at the jibes levelled at him from Putney Heath can hardly be doubted: I was told by a friend of his that he had been heard to speak of Swinburne--the _second_ Swinburne--as “a damned simulacrum.” Very different from Swinburne’s ungenerous attitude to Thomson was that of George Meredith, as may be seen from several of his letters to me, published in the _Life of James Thomson_, and reprinted in _Letters of George Meredith_. A proposal was made that Mr. Meredith should himself write an appreciation of “B.V.”; this he could not do, but he gave me permission to make use of any opinions he had expressed by letter to me or in conversation; I visited him at Box Hill in 1891, and he talked at great length on that and other subjects. Of Thomson he spoke with feelings akin to affection, exclaiming more than once: “Poor dear fellow! I bitterly reproach myself that I did not help him more, by getting him work on the _Athenæum_.” But he doubted if he could at that date have been reclaimed: earlier in life he might have been saved, he thought, by the companionship of a woman who would have given him sympathy and aid; praise, too, which had been the ruin of many writers (he instanced George Eliot and Dickens, with some trenchant remarks about both) would have been good for “B.V.,” who was so brave and honest. He himself, he said, had often felt what it was to lack all recognition, and sometimes, when he had looked up from his writing and seen a distant field in sunlight, he had thought, “it must be well to be in the warmth.” What above all he admired in Thomson was his resolute clear courage. There had been no mention of pessimism in their talk, except that when he had been speaking of the brightest and the darkest moods of Nature, Thomson answered: “I see no brightest.”