"You ask about Rupert Brooke. Considering we were on Christian name terms, I did not know him well, though enough to contradict the legends that the press are weaving round his name him. He was serene, humorous, intelligent and beautiful—as charming an acquaintance as one could desire—and latterly most friendly. But he was essentially hard; his hatred of slosh went rather too deep and affected the eternal water-springs, and I don't envy anyone who applied to him for sympathy. The sonnets, on which his reputation is evidently to be based, differ from all his previous work, which was rebellious and unorthodox. They were inspired by his romantic thoughts about war, not by his knowledge of it; that also, had he been spared to gain it, he was hoping to express, and, knowing his grim and grotesque realism, I feel sure that he would have expressed something besides the Holiness in which—to me so inappropriately—his work concludes. I don't know whether the above conveys anything to you. If it errs on the side of unkindness he himself wouldn't like it the less, for he was extraordinarily free of conceit and sincerely desired to be done by as he did. But he goes down to posterity as a sort of St Sebastian, haloed by the Dean of St Paul's, and hymned by the Morning Post as the evangelist of anti-Germanism. As far as I dare speak for Rupert, how he would hate it, or rather laugh at it."