Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/373

 been overworked, and am low and depressed, and came down here for quietness and a little preparation.

I will hope after Tuesday to see you. How much have we to speak of i How many things have passed, how many have changed since last we met!—Yours ever as of old, sincerely, .

Among the new friends I made at this time was William Allingham the poet. A note or two from him indicates business in which we were engaged, and revives the memory of a man whom I liked and admired:—

Later he urged me to write in Frazer's Magazine, of which he was editor, and at the same time Father Coleridge invited me to write in the Month, and Cashel Hoey in the Dublin Review, but I was determined to have a genuine holiday, and replied to them all by an emphatic negative.

Orion Horne, who was now in England, had passed his seventieth year, and had made no adequate provision for the trying days which were to come. Some of his friends determined that an application for a literary pension should be made on his behalf. A little earlier he had found it necessary to apply to the literary fund managed by men of letters for some temporary help, and they sent him double the sum he asked, with an expression of surprise and regret that he should have need to make such an application. But politicians are made of sterner stuff. The memorial on his behalf set forth that Mr. Horne was the author of "Orion" and many other works in poetry—dramatical and lyrical—which had long since received the highest eulogies from the highest quarters, and cited other official public work in which he was engaged. There were six-and-twenty signatures of whom it is only necessary to specify—Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Ruskin, Swinburne, Kingsley, Morris, Lord Lytton, Mathew Arnold, Rossetti, Sir Henry Taylor, and men eminent