career, but preferred to be a journalist. He returned to the home of his parents at Marston Trussell, near Market Harborough; and it was there that he did all his work. He wrote a weekly article about books for The Liverpool Courier, whose editor, Mr. Macleay, had been one of the first to appreciate his gifts. He wrote also many signed reviews for The Manchester Guardian. Mr. C. E. Montague, Mr. A. N. Monkhouse, and other pillars of that classic journal, were his friends. From London the keen eye of Sir William Robertson Nicoll discerned him, and soon he was contributing essays in criticism to The Bookman. Rather to his friends than to him it seemed a shame that his work should all be buried away disjectedly in the files of periodicals. He was persuaded to make a selection, to make a book. He began this task early in 1914, but, since he was as searching and sensitive a critic of himself as of others, I daresay he would not quickly have accomplished it even if the world's history had pursued its normal course and laid no new great claim on his spirit. So soon as 1914 had shown itself in its true colours, the personal task he had been working at must have seemed to him negligible enough. Anyhow, it was unfinished when he, a Lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery, sailed for Gallipoli. It was on October 2nd of last year that he landed there. And on the 23rd of that month he died of dysentery, aboard a hospital ship.
In the manner of his death, in the fact that such a brain as his stopped and was lost to us not by force of some random shell or bullet from the human enemy, but by operation of Nature on a frame that had never been robust, one may find—or not—a melancholy consolation. In any case, it is not he, save for what physical sufferings he may have had before death, that we need pity. Sympathy is never needed by the unknowing
