“In wiser days, my darling rosebud, blown To beauty proud as was your mother’s prime, In that desired, delayed, incredible time, “You’ll ask why I abandoned you, my own, And the dear heart that was your baby throne, To dice with death. And, oh! they’ll give you rhyme And reason: some will call the thing sublime, And some decry it in a knowing tone. So here, while the mad guns curse overhead, And tired men sigh, with mud for couch and floor, Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead, Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor, But for a dream, born in a herdsman’s shed, And for the secret Scripture of the poor. “_In the field, before Guillemont, Somme, September 4, 1916._” “Ballade Autumnal” is in Villon’s perfect manner, and his replies to Kipling and Watson will be remembered in Ireland for all time. In a volume entitled _Poems and Parodies_, his verses have been collected and published. Style in writing was a thing he regarded as of paramount importance. Though a prolific writer for newspapers, he was no believer in the theory of dashing off an article. On the contrary, he maintained that one of the drawbacks incidental to anything hastily written is that it is bound to be too serious. To write well, you must labour infinitely, otherwise one’s work is sure to bear traces of what he called the “heavy paw.” In the _Nationist_, when the slipshod work of some popular writer was being reviewed he observed, “At least _we_ are stylists.” In the same degree as he loved the expert, he abhorred the quack, the charlatan, the pseudo-writer of prose or poetry. I remember one night a popular novelist and writer of magazine stories, who had achieved fame and money without achieving literature, was telling with great unction of his success. He told how his recent book had been translated not only into French, Italian, Spanish, but even into a Dutch dialect. My husband, flicking the ash from a cigarette, said in a very urbane voice: “That is very interesting. I dare say then it will soon be translated into English.” In speaking, too, while his notes were scanty, in fact mere headings, he always thought out beforehand both the matter and form. As he put it, he favoured “carefully prepared impromptus.” Friends will remember him at his best as a conversationalist. As a raconteur he was inimitable, and, as a critic says, “It was not so much the point of his tale that counted. The divagations from the text in which he loved to indulge were the delight of his auditors.” “What Doctor Johnson said of Burke,” observes another critic, “was essentially true of Kettle, ‘that you could not have stood under an archway in his company to escape a passing shower without realising that he was a great man.’”