‘There came a little snow. But in the parlour over the shop--with the three windows closely curtained--one could have forgetfulness of weather. There was the neat fireplace; the little low tea-table; a bookcase in which Pelse--before that critical event at Aix-les-Bains--had been putting, gradually, first editions of the English poets; a cabinet of china, in which--but always before Aix-les-Bains--he had taken to accumulate some pretty English things of whitest paste or finest painting; a Worcester cup, with its exotic birds, its lasting gold, its scale-blue ground, like lapis lazuli or sapphire; a Chelsea figure; something from Swansea; white plates of Nantgarw, bestrewn with Billingsley’s greyish pink roses, of which he knew the beauty, the free artistic touch. How the things had lost interest for him! “From the moment,” says some French critic, “that a woman occupies me, my collection does not exist.” And many a woman may lay claim to occupy a French art critic; only one had occupied Richard Pelse.’ A curious anomaly can be remarked here, that in this period the great work of prose fiction was not to be resharpened by the young men to nearly the same extent as they resharpened the poetry and the essay. None approach Meredith and Hardy, who move like Titans of the age, while Kipling and Crackanthorpe are the only two young men that give any quantity of imaginative prose work of a high new order (and in saying this one must not overlook Arthur Morrison’s _Mean Streets_, or Zangwill’s Ghetto Tales, or the work of Henry James) until Conrad came from the sea and Louis Becke from Australia to give new vistas to our fiction. But it is not with them we are concerned here, but with Hubert Crackanthorpe,[13] of whose life the poet has sung: [13] It is interesting to note the verses also of the French poet Francis Jammes dedicated to Crackanthorpe. Jammes lived at Orthez when Crackanthorpe visited that remote countryside. Too rough his sea, too dark its angry tides! Things of a day are we, shadows that move The lands of shadow. Crackanthorpe commenced his literary career as the editor, with W. H. Wilkins, of _The Albemarle_, a monthly review started in January, 1892, with a splendid supplement lithograph.