It can scarcely be claimed that the prophecies of Meredith, Mr. Garvin, and Mr. Arnold Bennett were of the kind which ultimately assures the event. The reading-world dipped curiously into the pages about which there was so much conflict of opinion; it was startled and bewildered by a novel and difficult form of verse; and finally it agreed with the majority of critics that it was mostly nonsense--too Catholic to be catholic. The poems sold badly, the 'Hound of Heaven' faring best. It is a common mark of genius to be ahead of its time. Even Thompson's coreligionists were cold. Indeed, it may be said they were the coldest. If the general reading-public of the nineties suspected Thompson of being a Victorian reactionary of ultra-montane mould, the Catholic public feared him for his art. It was a wild unfettered thing which took strange liberties with Catholic pieties and could not be trusted to run in divine grooves. One can afford to extenuate the attitude of reserve. It was a period when brilliant heterodoxies and flaunting decadence were in the air. The fact is, that critics and public delivered Thompson over to the Catholics; and the Catholics would have nothing to do with him. Canon Sheehan could write of Thompson in 1898: "Only two Catholics--literary Catholics--have noticed this surprising genius--Coventry Patmore and Wilfrid Meynell. The vast bulk of our coreligionists have not even heard his name, although it is already bruited amongst the Immortals; and the great Catholic poet, for whose advent we have been straining our vision, has passed beneath our eyes, sung his immortal songs, and vanished." This was written almost ten years before Thompson died, but after his resolve to write no more poetry. It is easily within the probabilities that, small as was Thompson's audience during his lifetime, it would have been still smaller but for the extraneous interest excited by the strange story of his life. He was born on December 16, 1859, in Preston, Lancashire, whence he went at the age of eleven to Ushaw College, a Catholic boarding school for boys. This is the college where Lafcadio Hearn received his education; he had left the school a year or two before young Thompson's arrival. Both boys were designed for the priesthood. Hearn lost his faith then or shortly afterwards: Thompson's irregular habits of dreamy abstraction rendered him unfit for a sacerdotal career. When he had completed his course at college, where he had distinguished himself in English composition and attained respectable standing in the classics, his father, a hard-working physician, entered the lad, now eighteen, as a student of medicine in Owen College, Manchester. The Thompson family had moved from Preston to Ashton-under-Lyne, where proximity to Manchester made it possible for the young medical student to spend his nights at home.