Hall Caine, the Man and the Novelist. C. Fred Kenyon

he likes playing with words and sentences. He is naturally communicative—tells his thoughts, and gossips about himself pleasantly. He has been gracing a friend’s essay on ‘War’ with a couple of stanzas. Not that he is a peace-at-any-price man; the stanzas, though not at all sanguinary, are highly patriotic. He has even delivered a Temperance lecture, and not without much appreciation on the part of the ancients who heard him; but he positively declines to pursue Fame on the Temperance platform. Then after a little pleasantry he hopes I am laughing, as he himself does at his own jokes; in the first place, for reasons of prudence—since none other might laugh save himself, and in the second place, because it is unchristianlike to ask another to do what you refuse to do yourself. One item startles us. He has just finished a play in blank verse, and inquires if I should like to peruse it.

      “In another letter he hopes the correspondence will continue, since he knows it would tend ‘towards the establishment in our minds of fixed principles, upon matters the most important to man’s welfare here, as well as in that existence of his which (we believe) is to come.’ It would also strengthen our friendship, though upon the subject generally he has some sad things to say—as that at the time he is writing there lived not the man with whom he had ‘true unity of feeling.’ As the letter proceeds we see that he is entering the melancholy period of life when sad and depressed spirits are a very frequent distemper with young men who are thoughtful and live much alone. In such a mood Caine had the day before written verses some of which he quotes, and a few lines of which I further quote.