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identity, its haecceitas , or “thisness”. Distilling, through medieval philosophy, the purer spirit of faith and reason that had existed before the adulteration of the Enlightenment, Hopkins had served up Catholic theology to an unsuspecting modernity, which, accustomed to lighter fare, became intoxicated by its heady effects. In effect, therefore, and with more than a modicum of irony, Hopkins’ much-vaunted status as an honorary “modern” springs from his adherence to the authentic tradition of the Church, a powerful reminder that orthodoxy is always dynamic.
    Although Hopkins remained unknown as a poet until the 1920s, he was not wholly without influence during his own lifetime. He was a close friend of Robert Bridges, and his critical judgment was greatly valued by Coventry Patmore. On one occasion Patmore actually burned one of his own manuscripts after it had been criticized by Hopkins. Following Hopkins’ death in 1889, Patmore wrote the following words of tribute in a letter to Bridges:
I can well understand how terrible a loss you have suffered in the death of Gerard Hopkins—you who saw so much more of him than I did. . . . Gerard Hopkins was the only orthodox, and as far as I could see, saintly man in whom religion had absolutely no narrowing effect upon his general opinions and sympathies. A Catholic of the most scrupulous strictness, he could nevertheless see the Holy Spirit in all goodness, truth and beauty; and there was something in all his words and manners which were at once a rebuke and an attraction to all who could only aspire to be like him.
    Although Patmore enjoyed the critical acclaim that eluded Hopkins during his lifetime, it would be fair to say that his verse does not reach the sublime heights that Hopkins achieves in his greatest poems. Yet Patmore’s finest poetry, which followed the death of his first wife in 1862 and his conversion to Roman Catholicism two years later, almost justifies Sir Herbert Read’s judgment that much of his verse represents “true poetry of the rarest and perhaps the highest kind”.
    Perhaps Patmore’s greatest champion in the final decades of the nineteenth century was Alice Meynell, herself a poet of some merit, who published popular anthologies of his verse. Together with her husband, Wilfrid Meynell, she edited several periodicals that were highly influential and that were instrumental in popularizing other Catholic writers, of whom the most notable was Francis Thompson. The energy and enthusiasm that the Meynells displayed in their tireless promotion of the Catholic literati in late Victorian and Edwardian England helped to oil the wheels of, and give momentum to, the Catholic literary revival as it entered the twentieth century. This was a role taken up with equal vigor by Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward in the years between the two world wars. Nonetheless, the Meynells’ greatest gift to posterity was their responsibility for the rescue and rehabilitation of Francis Thompson from a life of poverty and opium addiction on the streets of post-Dickensian London. Without their timely intervention, it is likely that Thompson would have died in wretched obscurity, without ever writing much of the poetry that has secured his place alongside Hopkins as the greatest Christian poet of the Victorian era. Three volumes of his poetry were published by the Meynells between 1893 and 1897 to immediate critical acclaim.
    Through the Meynells, Thompson got to know the aging Patmore shortly before the latter’s death in 1896, and there are hints of Patmore’s influence in some of Thompson’s work. The most obvious example of this can be seen in a comparison between Patmore’s greatest poem, “The Toys”, and Thompson’s “Love and the Child”, both of which employ observations of a parent-child relationship as a metaphor for the relationship of man with God. There is also a remarkable affinity between Thompson’s mystical vision of nature and Hopkins’