The death last week of Wilfrid Meynell removes one of
our last surviving links with the world of pre-Raphaelite and late Victorian literature and art. The friend of Robert Browning, Coventry Patmore, and Sir Henry Taylor, Meynell was born on the day before the funeral of the first Duke of Wellington in 1852. He died last Friday at the not inconsiderable age of 95. Although himself a practised essayist and a distinguished minor poet, Meynell will chiefly be remembered by posterity as the discoverer and saviour of Francis Thompson, and as the husband of Alice Meynell, whom he married seventy-one years ago. In their early married days, when they had set up house in Kensington and taken seriously earning their living as journalists, essay-writers, editors and art-critics, both Wilfrid and Alice Meynell were contributors to The Spectator. Six of their children still survive, including Sir Francis Meynell, the eminent typographer and book designer. How many people in London, incidentally, realise that it is to the taste and skill of Sir Francis Meynell that they owe the newly designed covers of the London Telephone Directory ?
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