THE LATE MR. A. PATCHETT MARTIN. [To THE EDITOR OF
THE "SPECTATOR."] Sin,—The publication in the Spectator of February 22nd of the late Arthur Patchett Martin's last poem emboldens me, as one who was much associated with him during the last years of his life, to ask the favour of a little space in your correspondence columns for a brief appreciation of my friend. That he was a not inconsiderable literary man, a delicate and in-seeing critic, and one who had very clear Imperial percep- tions may be known to many. But it needed a good deal of close intimacy to reach the deeper man and to find and Iappraise properly the analytical qualities of his mind,-* qualities which his modesty and diffidence often uncon- sciously obscured. I think I never till I knew him in- timately quite understood that deep romance that often pervades the Colonial mind and finds "national" expres- sion in the almost menacing "Advance, Australia!" of her conscious destiny. And this romanticism was not lessened, but rather was it increased, by the fact that his late years were passed upon English soil and amid English surroundings. He lived in the day here of the recognition by the "mighty Mother" of the fruit of her sowing, and his estimate of our later and worthier conduct to our far-away children was always tinged by the words that grow out of the solitudes and are full of the mystery of loneliness. To one who, like myself, knew how hopeless his condition was for the last three years, the pathos of his noble patience and un- disturbed good fellowship could but fill me with almost envious admiration. It may be that some new faculty of mind is occasionally evolved by the hypnotism of the ad- vancing shadow, and that the effort of good humour, even in the lethal interval between what has been and what may be, may not be so consciously great. That I cannot say, though I may one day come to know it. But this I can aver, that with powers in abeyance which he knew he might have exer- cised, in the cancelled hour of a gentle but noble ambition, with all the attendant humiliations of disease, I never heard an angry word fall from his lips or noticed any lapse in his almost fastidious courtesy. A paper lies before me on which he had written his own desire as to the form of words which should mark his resting-place, and in the concluding lines (from Browning) is his own pitiful acknowledgment of a life that had had trials and troubles, for he wishes us to say:—
" There is surely a rest • • • • • • And I have had troubles enough for one."
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