"I need hardly say I have not escaped the accusation of belonging to a 'Mutual Admiration Society.' There are few writers, I fancy, but have at one time or another been surprised by the experience. For it is often an odd surprise. I myself, for example, am a recluse; with one or two intimate friends whom I see and one or two whom I don't. If in the latter case you deny the intimacy you fail to grasp that I am a recluse. I saw them ten years ago--there's intimacy. I might see them again next week, or year--why then, there's more intimacy. And I don't need to see them at all--go to, would you desire better intimacy? The chapter of my intimate friends is as of the snakes in Ireland. My intimate friends I do, past question, encounter of odd times--if that constitute the acquaintance, it is the limit of mine. But speculative assumption, as it is without knowledge, so cannot have knowledge of its own incongruity.
"Nor is the reciprocal admiration of small men necessarily foolish: it is foolish only when it admires what each wishes to be, not what he is. For my part I have known in true literary men generosity united with unflinching plainness of speech. They love literature too much, that they should bring into her presence less than severe truth, within the scope and compass of their conception."
If Thompson had been scolded for his Catholic friends, his Catholic friends were to be scolded for their Thompson, but on a different score. In the _American Ecclesiastical Review_, for June 1898, Canon Sheehan, author of _The Triumph of Failure_, wrote:--
"For the present he will write no more poetry. Why? I should hardly like to intrude upon the privacy of another's thoughts; but Francis Thompson, who, with all his incongruities, ranks in English poetry with Shelley, and _only_ beneath Shakespeare, has hardly had any recognition in Catholic circles. If Francis Thompson had been an Anglican or a Unitarian, his praises would have been sung unto the ends of the earth. He would have been the creator of a new school of poetry. Disciples would have knelt at his feet. But, being only a Catholic, he is allowed to retire, and bury in silence one of the noblest imaginations that have ever been given to Nature's select ones--her poets. Only two Catholics--literary Catholics--have noticed this surprising genius--Coventry Patmore and Wilfrid Meynell. The vast bulk of our co-religionists have not even heard his name, although it is already bruited amongst the Immortals; and _the_ great Catholic poet, for whose advent we have been straining our vision, has passed beneath our eyes, sung his immortal songs, and vanished."