He wrote a play, “The Northern Night,” that see the light of day in 1894 in a collection of short dramas called Vistas. He also selected the poems and wrote the introduction for Great Odes: English and American, a Canterbury volume that appeared in April. Stanley Little that his Life of Browning was “going splendidly – already about 10,000 copies disposed of.”ĢWhile working on the Browning biography and “Basil Hope,” Sharp also wrote the Browningesque prose piece “Fragments from the Lost Journal of Piero di Cosimo” which appeared in two parts in the January and April issues of The Art Review, the short-lived successor to The Scottish Art Review that James Mavor edited and Walter Scott published from January to June 1890. The half-dozen advanced copies which were printed several days later must not have contained Sharp’s corrections as he felt obliged to send an “Errata and Addenda” slip to at least two potential reviewers. In an April 7 letter to Frank Marzials, general editor of Walter Scott’s Great Writers Series, he said he had nearly finished reviewing and revising proofs of the Browning book and would return them in the morning. The letter was written in Edinburgh where he had gone for a few days to visit his mother and rest his eyes and head after intense work on the Browning book. After his return to London in February, he continued to work on the Browning manuscript and “Basil Hope.” In mid-March, he wrote to congratulate Bliss Carman, the poet he had met the previous summer in Canada, on his appointment as an editorial writer for the New York Independent. In mid-January, to escape the distractions of London, he went to Hastings where he worked steadily on the Browning biography and enjoyed long walks with the poet Coventry Patmore who was living there. He was also writing articles for the Scottish Leader and “London Letters” for the Glasgow Herald. In early January, he was working on the Browning monograph and beginning a novel, “The Ordeal of Basil Hope,” which never saw the light of day. In the first two months of 1890, Sharp recorded his activities in a diary, parts of which his wife preserved in the Memoir. A good deal of alcohol was consumed, or so he told Ford Madox Brown in a letter thanking him for his New Year’s card, a proof of his Samson and Delilah etching. 1After spending a pleasant Christmas with friends – the painter Keeley Halswelle and his wife Helena – near Petersfield in Hampshire, the Sharps entertained friends for dinner at their South Hampstead home on New Year’s Day.
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