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‘I daresay I’d be wiser not to whittle away my copy. I
think I’ll do an article for one of the reviews, and then I can
just print it afterwards as a preface.’
Philip kept his eye on the monthlies, and a few weeks
later it appeared. The article made something of a stir, and
extracts from it were printed in many of the papers. It was
a very good article, vaguely biographical, for no one knew
much of Cronshaw’s early life, but delicate, tender, and
picturesque. Leonard Upjohn in his intricate style drew
graceful little pictures of Cronshaw in the Latin Quarter,
talking, writing poetry: Cronshaw became a picturesque
figure, an English Verlaine; and Leonard Upjohn’s coloured
phrases took on a tremulous dignity, a more pathetic gran-
diloquence, as he described the sordid end, the shabby
little room in Soho; and, with a reticence which was whol-
ly charming and suggested a much greater generosity than
modesty allowed him to state, the efforts he made to trans-
port the Poet to some cottage embowered with honeysuckle
amid a flowering orchard. And the lack of sympathy, well-
meaning but so tactless, which had taken the poet instead
to the vulgar respectability of Kennington! Leonard Up-
john described Kennington with that restrained humour
which a strict adherence to the vocabulary of Sir Thomas
Browne necessitated. With delicate sarcasm he narrated
the last weeks, the patience with which Cronshaw bore the
well-meaning clumsiness of the young student who had ap-
pointed himself his nurse, and the pitifulness of that divine
vagabond in those hopelessly middle-class surroundings.
Beauty from ashes, he quoted from Isaiah. It was a triumph

Of Human Bondage