Robert Buchanan was another of Roden Noel’s friends with whom I became acquainted and had a good deal of correspondence. His later writings, owing to their democratic tendencies and extreme outspokenness, received much less public attention than the earlier ones; in _The New Rome_, in particular, there were a number of trenchant poems denouncing the savageries of an aggressive militarism, and pleading the cause of the weak and suffering folk, whether human or sub-human, against the tyrannous and strong. So marked, in his later years, became Buchanan’s humanitarian sympathies, that when his biography was written by Miss Harriett Jay, in 1903, I was asked to contribute a chapter on the subject. An anthologist, as I have said, meets with much courtesy from poets, yet his path is not altogether a rose-strewn one. When I undertook the work, I was warned by Mr. Bernard Shaw that the only certain result would be that I should draw on myself the concentrated resentment of all the authors concerned: this forecast was far from being verified; but in one or two instances I did become aware of certain irritable symptoms on the part of poetical acquaintances whose own songs of freedom had unluckily escaped my notice. Then the over-anxiety of some authors as to which of their master-pieces should be included, and which withheld, was at times a trial to an editor. One of my contributors, who had moved in high circles, was concerned to think that certain royalties of his acquaintance might feel hurt by his arraignment of tyrants: “but if the Czar,” he wrote, “takes it home to himself, I shall be only too delighted.” Whether any protest from the Czar or other crowned heads was received by the publishers of the Canterbury Poets Series, I never heard. But if poets are the forerunners of a future society, to “poet-naturalists” also must a like function be assigned. Of Thoreau, to whom that title was first and most fittingly given, I have already spoken; and his was the genius which, to me, next to that of Shelley, was the most astonishing of nineteenth-century portents; a scion of the future, springing up, like some alien wild-flower, unclassed and uncomprehended: like Shelley’s, too, his wisdom is still far ahead of our age, and destined to be increasingly acknowledged.