It was when [the poet John Davidson (1857-1909)] was writing his Random Itinerary, a record of tramps round London at a distance of some eight to ten miles from Charing Cross. I accompanied him on one of them. We lunched on bread and cheese and beer consumed on an alehouse bench. The fare was Spartan, but the talk — on his side at least — was Attic. Only one fragment remains with me, but it is a valuable one. 'Every man,' said Davidson, 'should make his own anthology, and (pointing to his forehead) keep it here.'
“I do not think altogether the worse of a book for having survived the author a generation or two. I have more confidence in the dead than the living.” — Hazlitt
1 November 2013
Every Man's Anthology
J. Lewis May, John Lane and the Nineties (London: Bodley Head, 1936), pp. 102-103: