He had a Pickering copy of each poem, which he carried in his pocket
and referred to in railway trains, both in England and Italy, when
saying the poems over to himself. These two little books are now in
the library of St. John's College, Cambridge. He was, however,
disappointed to find that he could not retain more than a book or
two at a time and that, on learning more, he forgot what he had
learnt first; but he was about sixty at the time. Shakespeare's
Sonnets, on which he published a book in 1899, gave him less trouble
in this respect; he knew them all by heart, and also their order,
and one consequence of this was that he wrote some sonnets in the
Shakespearian form. He found this intimate knowledge of the poet's
work more useful for his purpose than reading commentaries by those
who were less familiar with it. "A commentary on a poem," he would
say, "may be useful as material on which to form an estimate of the
commentator, but the poem itself is the most important document you
can consult, and it is impossible to know it too intimately if you
want to form an opinion about it and its author.
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