Page:A Voice from the Nile, and Other Poems. (Thomson, Dobell).djvu/38

Rh other paper or magazine in which "Vane's Story," or "The City of Dreadful Night" would have been allowed to appear.

Thomson left the army in October, 1862. He had long been weary of his position in it; but the immediate cause of his leaving was that an accusation of a breach of military discipline was made against him. The story is not worth telling at length: but it may be stated that whether the accusation was true or false, it was one that reflected no moral blame upon him whatever. On leaving the army he applied to Mr. Bradlaugh, who was then acting as managing clerk to a solicitor named Levison, to know whether he could find employment for him. Bradlaugh at once engaged him as a clerk in his office, and also offered him a home with his own family. Thomson accepted this offer, and for some years thereafter the most intimate relations existed between them.

I do not find anything specially worthy of record during the next nine or ten years of Thomson's life, although, in a literary point of view, these years were perhaps his best and most productive period. In 1869 Mr. Froude accepted his poem called "Sunday up the River" for Fraser's Magazine, of which he was then the editor. Before inserting it, he asked Charles Kingsley's opinion upon it, whose judgment was warmly in its favour. This was almost the only instance (before the publication of "The City of Dreadful Night" in 1880) in which he was enabled to get one of his productions published, apart from the Secular papers. It may be worth mentioning that at one time he wrote two or three articles for the Daily Telegraph, and he might