THE " BLIND POET."
(To TIM EDITOR or rue " SPECTATOR.") Sut,---11r. H. H. Sergent is quite correct in writing—a propos of your admirable and most just review of The Life and Letters of Theodore Watts-Dunton—to ask whether it was not Philip Bourke Marston who n as " the blind poet," not his father, Dr. Westland Marston. That is so, and Mr. Sergent's correction is therefore welcome. But as one who knew Dr. Marston, his son, and Mr. Watts-Dunton, I may add that your reviewer is quite right, and Mr. Sergent mistaken, in regard to the literary gatherings referred to in the book in question. Those gatherings were at Dr. Marston's house, near Regent's Park, as your reviewer states. The Marstons, father and son, lived afterwards, and to the last, at 191 Euston Road, and there, it is true, Philip entertained his friends. His father was generally of the company, but the famous meetings your reviewer had in mind were undoubtedly those at Dr. Marston's house. I do not think that Philip Marston is quite so ' strangely neglected a poet " as Mr. Sergent thinks. My friend the late Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton, who was his literary executor, asked me, as a friend of Philip's, to act in that capacity after her own death, and I am constantly receiving letters request- ing permission to set his songs to music, or to inolude poems in anthologies. Songtide, a selected edition of his poems, included in the " Canterbury Poets," has had no inconsiderable sale.—I am, Sir, &c., CoraSOv KERNAUAN. The Savage Club, Adelpla Terrace.
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