affectionate banter: they also contain criticisms on living poets:
he shows an admiration, discriminating and not wholesale, of Mr.
Kipling's verse: he censures Mr. Swinburne, whose Jacobite song (as
he wrote to myself) did not precisely strike him as the kind of
thing that Jacobites used to sing.

They certainly celebrated


`The faith our fathers fought for,
The kings our fathers knew,'


in a different tone in the North.

The perfect health of mind, in these letters of a dying man, is
admirable. Reading old letters over, he writes to Miss -, `I have
known a wonderful number of wonderfully kind-hearted people.' That
is his criticism of a world which had given him but a scanty
welcome, and a life of foiled endeavour, of disappointed hope. Even
now there was a disappointment. His poems did not find a publisher:
what publisher can take the risk of adding another volume of poetry
to the enormous stock of verse brought out at the author's expense?
This did not sour or sadden him: he took Montaigne's advice, `not
to make too much marvel of our own fortunes.' His biographer,
hearing in the winter of 1893 that Murray's illness was now
considered hopeless, though its rapid close was not expected, began,
with Professor Meiklejohn, to make arrangements for the publication
of the poems. But the poet did not live to have this poor
gratification. He died in the early hours of 1894.