The receipt of a cheque in payment for the Robertson article in Once a Week convinced me, not only that I had discovered my mÉtier, but that I had formally entered upon a profitable occupation, which would be pursued under most agreeable conditions. Let me at once confess that some years were to elapse before the returns from my literary labours amounted to a sum that would pay for my tobacco and my laundry. But if in the period of keeping my terms cheques were few and far between, I got no end of an opportunity of seeing my name in print as the author of at least one prodigious poetical work and of several essays, chiefly of dramatic criticism. It is pleasant to reflect that these exercises—early and immature though they were—brought me several friends in the literary and artistic world. At this juncture, indeed, it appeared probable that I would eventually develop into a “litery gent” whose future outlook would be that of considerable dubiety as to the respectability of the journalistic calling.

A friendly solicitor—I had been admonished to make friends of the Mammon of Unrighteousness—introduced me at a City dinner to William Harrison Ainsworth, author of “The Tower of London” and other lurid romances. It was a bit of a surprise to meet the venerable man, for, truth to tell, I had thought him long since dead. He was by no means dead, however, or even apparently moribund, but extremely alive to anything that looked like business. His Manchester training never failed him to the end. He exhibited a fatherly interest in me, which was extremely flattering to my vanity, and before we parted he had arranged a luncheon date for the following week. He was living at the time at Hurstpierpoint in Sussex. I kept the appointment, you may be well assured, and after our little midday meal the worthy exponent of Dick Turpin opened his business.

It was a simple affair. He had acquired a magazine some time before, and, finding that its circulation did not come up to his expectations, he had resold to a relative—a cousin of his own. He had agreed with the sanguine relative that he would continue to send in signed contributions, and that he would secure the services of other brilliant writers; and I was one of the “brilliant writers” whose exertions were to raise the cousin’s hopeless purchase into a position of safety. Harrison Ainsworth candidly assured me that the proprietor was not in a position to pay for the serial rights of my esteemed contributions. But the copyright should remain mine—a valuable concession and consideration!—and I should receive suitable remuneration when the magazine “turned the corner.” Ah, that fugacious corner which, always nearing, is rarely reached, and never by any chance turned! How often has it lured the novice and tempted even the needy veteran victim! I agreed to all my host’s suggestions. As I left him, he murmured a tremulous “God bless you!” and I was conscious of a fine feeling of elation as I returned to town—my star evidently in the ascendant.

If there was no money to be obtained from my new engagement, there was some fun: there was excellent practice, and there was the unexpected introduction to a “set” whose members I had always admired at a distance, but with whom my taste and training had denied me an understanding sympathy. For a while I fluttered in those reserved groves. But when at last the Street of Adventure claimed me as its own, my new associates drew me from those higher altitudes. The loss, I am sure, has all been mine.

On the magazine, to which I had pledged myself, I commenced as a poet, a poem being the only thing I had by me. The cousinly proprietor—an extremely pleasant old gentleman, also named Ainsworth—appeared glad to accept anything. He was the only person whom I have known literally to laugh over misfortunes. He was a septuagenarian Mark Tapley. He gave excellent dinners at Ravenscourt Park—the house in which he entertained has long since been reduced to what printers call “pie,” its place being covered with brand-new “mansions” and “gardens” and villas. It speaks volumes for the old gentleman’s good-nature that, when my “poem” appeared, filling five pages of his periodical, he never uttered a word of rebuke or reproach. That was forty years ago, and I still regard the incident with gratitude, for the composition was a narrative of great duration. The scene was laid in Italy, the subject romantic, and the verse written in heroic couplets, interspersed with lyrics after the manner made fashionable by the Poet Laureate. I never saw it again after my first rapturous readings, but I have little doubt that it was sad stuff.

I then resolutely set myself to keep my proprietor fed up with prose essays. I had the material, and I took no end of pains with the setting. They were for the most part essays in literary criticism, and one or two of them attracted the attention of the right sort of people. Many years after its appearance, I was surprised and gratified to find one of these early articles quoted in the AthenÆum by Theodore Watts-Dunton, and quoted, moreover, by that distinguished man of letters as being authoritative. Alas! by the time this appreciation of my literary research and criticism appeared I had ceased to take myself very seriously, and I was mixing in a society that did not take anything very seriously. In my early years I had the run of a good dramatic library, particularly rich in editions of the Elizabethan masters. The majority of my essays of this period were derived from those boyish studies, fortified by later browsings in the reading-room of the British Museum. The eminent but erratic Irish gentleman with whom I was reading Law had suggested the Museum, little imagining the direction which my researches there were sometimes to take. To which of these fugitive pieces of the Ainsworthonian period of my novitiate I owed my introduction to Madox Brown, the celebrated Pre-Raphaelite painter, I cannot distinctly recall. Clearly, it would not have been to that terrible Italian romance in heroic couplets. But the thing happened somehow, and I still remember the pleasurable sensations I experienced when Oliver, the son of the great artist, called on me by appointment and took me round to the house in Fitzroy Square, to be introduced to his father. Madox Brown was a handsome man, of medium height, broad-shouldered, with a wiry beard, at that time just beginning to show the grey autumnal tints. The charm of the man was to be caught in the sweet benignity of his expression and in the musical cadences of his voice. He was evidently the devoted family man. And it was his interest in his own children that caused him to suffer the society of other young fellows struggling for notice. Among those who dropped in at the studio that afternoon were Theo Marzials, the author of the popular “Twickenham Ferry,” and Hueffer, the exponent of Wagner, who was engaged to Brown’s daughter.

A reception to which I received an invitation some weeks after was my first appearance in one of the select literary circles of the capital. It was in honour of Hueffer and his bride-to-be, and was held at the Madox Brown house in Fitzroy Square on the night before the wedding. It was a rather weird experience. And not even the fact that Swinburne was present—and his was a figure to arouse all my youthful enthusiasm—reconciled me to the gathering. I felt as much alone in this crowd as I had formerly felt in the seething streets. I beat an early retreat, profoundly impressed by the reflection that I did not possess the natural adaptability which would make me an acceptable member of a society with its own especial equipment, its own passwords, and its own particular pose. I should never have become a competent authority on that which Carlyle calls “the Correggiosity of Correggio.”

The Madox Brown connection led to an invitation to Westland Marston’s less “precious” Sunday receptions, and to those of Lady Duffus Hardy. At the latter house I met for the first time Joaquin Millar, the poet of the Sierras. Millar and I were to become great friends later on, but on first meeting him my feeling was one of frank dislike. At the time his pose was that of the wild man of the illimitable plains. He kept his hair in curling cataracts down his shoulders. He wore great jack-boots over his trousers, and was accustomed to appear in the Park mounted on a hack harnessed with a Mexican saddle, blinkers, and other absurd accoutrements. The rider wore a white sombrero, and gilt spurs six inches long. If his object was to attract attention, he undoubtedly succeeded. In the drawing-room of the Hardys he struck the sublimest attitudes, and, when he crossed the room, did it with a limp—because he had heard that Byron limped.

His utterances were studied with a view of occasioning surprise. He had then lately returned from a tour in Italy.

“What struck you most about Venice?” inquired one of his fair admirers.

“The bugs!” he replied with entire gravity, and stroking his golden beard.

“Oh, Mr. Millar!” exclaimed the lady, in shocked reproof.

“But,” he proceeded calmly, “the bugs in Venice are not the mild domestic animals you cultivate in this country. A Venetian bug has a beard and moustache as big as the King of Italy’s.”

It was during this stay in England that Millar met a lady to whom he became engaged, and the poet would have married her had her parents not discovered in time that the wild man of the illimitable plains had already a wife and child stranded somewhere on the South Pacific Coast.

Joaquin Millar became in time quite a civilized Christian, and I reflect, with some natural satisfaction, that I was the humble means in the hands of Providence that, some years after our first frigid meeting, succeeded in inducing him to get his hair cut. An immense social and moral rehabilitation followed this sacrifice on the part of a poet who had his share of the Divine afflatus. What he lost in picturesqueness he gained in self-respect, and during his brief sojourns in London he figured as a Bohemian observant of the conventions, and possessed of a certain subtle humour, which rendered his society very agreeable to his club mates at the Savage.

The travelling American millionaire is a strange portent in his way; but to me a far more wonderful thing is the American who on a small and irregular pay, often derived from correspondence with some third-rate newspaper, supplemented by the proceeds of a few magazine articles, manages to travel all over the habitable globe. You will meet them—cultivating literature on a little oatmeal—in London, in Paris, in Rome, in St. Petersburg, in Tokio, in Honolulu. They are always waiting for remittances, and they are always on the move. One of these wanderers I met at Millar’s rooms in Bloomsbury. She was a fine woman—robust, large-eyed, sentimental, but with a certain saving sense of humour. Her sole means were derived from a weekly letter written for a San Francisco newspaper. Yet she was setting out to do what she called “the grand tower.” She was not so lucky as the others. I met her at the same rooms a year afterwards. She had just returned from “the grand tower.” She looked awfully worn and ill, and she was accompanied by a gigantic brigand, who had not a word of any language save his own incommunicable patois. He breathed hard and scowled and shrugged his shoulders while he rolled his eyes and smoked innumerable cigarettes. His name, even when gently broken to us by his fair introducer, was a wholly impossible thing. But he was a Count—or so he said. And the infatuated correspondent of the Californian paper was “my lady,” for she had married the brute. The Count had probably been a Neapolitan luggage-porter, or something of the kind, and my own private opinion is that he beat the poor woman and otherwise ill-treated her.

Charles Warren Stoddard is another name which pleasantly connects itself with those days of emergence. There are few parts of the civilized globe over which “dear Charlie”—as his intimates called him—has not trotted. He lived the absolutely “natural life” in the South Seas. The result of that enervating experience may be seen in two very delightful books, “South Sea Idylls,” published over thirty years ago, and “The Island of Tranquil Delights,” published in this country a couple of years since. He travelled all over Europe, joining a monastic brotherhood at Rome. This he quitted after a few years’ experience, his memories of tropical islands, perhaps, engendering a hankering after the fleshpots. On one of the Pyramids he met Williamson the actor—to become in the fulness of time Williamson the successful Australian manager—and on the tomb of the Pharaohs he gave Williamson an introduction to me, which led to a very delightful acquaintanceship. From a Japanese poet named Noguki, who recently produced a wonderful book of verse in London, I heard that he had met Stoddard in Tokio, and that he was then on his way to take up a Chair of English Literature at a University in Washington. But he must have wandered away from that place of safety, for I next heard of him as having escaped by the skin of his teeth from the awful seismic disaster in San Francisco. You don’t want much money in a monastery, and you probably get enough to live on while teaching English literature to the youth of the United States. But, deducting these two brief periods of retirement from wandering, Stoddard must have moved around, surveying the wonders of the world, on an income entirely derived from fugitive articles in the papers of California.

Stoddard brought me to see Mark Twain at the Langham Hotel. The two men were great friends, and, indeed, I believe that some of the descriptive touches in the lectures delivered in London by Twain were “written in” by Stoddard. It was a fearfully foggy afternoon on which we made our call. Twain was walking up and down his sitting-room, evidently in a low key. The sight of Stoddard, however, cheered him. He pointed to a table at the end of the room, on which were ranged, in vast quantities, the materials necessary for the compounding of cocktails, and begged us to help ourselves. When we had got our medicine “fixed”—an operation which our host kindly undertook for me—Stoddard asked suddenly:“Say, Clemens, what have you done with your shorthand writer?”

“Shot him,” replied Twain grimly.

“You don’t say!” exclaimed Stoddard.

“I shot him out into the fog. He couldn’t hurt the fog much. Another ten minutes of him would have killed me.”

Then came out the explanation of this short and cryptic dialogue. In genial conversation with his visitors Twain got off some uncommonly “good things,” and, as he rarely recalled the items that went best, he was induced to engage a stenographer, who, concealed from him and from his visitors, should take down the coinage of his wit as it came hot from the mint. The shorthand writer was duly installed in his cave. Visitors arrived. But Twain’s conversational powers had deserted him. “Couldn’t scintillate worth a cent” would have been his own way of describing the situation. The knowledge of the fact that a paid reporter was taking him down seemed to sterilize his brain. The stenographer had got on the humorist’s nerves. Twain before his visitors opened not his mouth.

I question, however, whether any stenographer could have conveyed, by the mere words uttered by Twain in conversation, the peculiar charm and savour of his impromptus, which lay in the manner rather than in the matter. Ready, apposite, and spontaneous, he undoubtedly was; but the melancholy drawl which he affected, the quaint American accent, the impassive features of the speaker, added enormously to the value of the utterance. And these, of course, transcend the powers of a reporter to reproduce.

Against the advice of his agent—poor old George Dolby, who had acted in the same capacity for Dickens—Twain had stopped his lectures at the Hanover Square Rooms for a “spell” in the provinces. On the evening of the day on which we called he was to resume the course which he had abandoned. The low key in which we found him was the result of the fog, in the first place; and, in the second place, he was worrying himself by recalling the warnings Dolby had given him about the danger of interrupting the course originally, his fear of the power of some new attraction, his knowledge of the fickleness of public taste. And as the afternoon advanced the fog grew more dense. We remained with the depressed humorist until Dolby arrived to escort him to the rooms. An hour before the time for commencing the lecture all four of us got into a growler, and were swallowed by the fog. I have never measured the distance between the Langham Hotel and Hanover Square, but I think I could manage it in ten minutes. It took our cabby just three-quarters of an hour to land his fare. He lost his way twice, and finally was obliged to get off the box, engage the services of an imp carrying a link, and lead his dejected horse. Dolby had been right in getting us off early. When we arrived at the hall, we had just ten minutes in hand.

Twain was in a state of the most profound depression. Stoddard and I took our places in the front row of the stalls. The house was full of fog, and only half full of audience. Dolby afterwards told me that he had experienced the greatest difficulty in inducing Twain to appear at all. An appeal to his honour and the risk of ignoring an engagement with his public at last prevailed. About five minutes after the advertised time he came out. He advanced slowly to the very edge of the platform—the tips of his pumps, indeed, went over the edge. He craned his neck, peering through the mist. In his sad, slow way he commenced:

“Ladies and gentlemen . . . I don’t know . . . whether you can see me or not. . . . But I’m here!”

You observe that there is nothing in the mere words. But their spontaneity and appositeness told at once. The effect was electrical. The audience was put into a good humour, and the lecture went with a roar of laughter and applause from start to finish.

Dr. Gordon Hake was a friend whom I made through a review of his “Poems and Parables,” printed by my Tapleyan editor. Hake was a most courtly old gentleman, and when actively engaged in the pursuit of his profession—he had been a general medical practitioner—must have possessed an enviable degree of what is known among physicians as “a fine bedside manner.” The doctor had a pleasant little place at Coombe End, just beyond the spot at which Roehampton Lane impinges on Wimbledon Common. Under his hospitable roof I met one or two famous men and a goodly number of men who aspired to be famous. Of the famous men I shall here make mention of one only.

George Borrow, author of “Lavengro” and “Romany Rye,” was an old friend of Hake’s, and I was invited down to Coombe End to meet that very extraordinary old gentleman. Dr. Hake had taken care to warn me that it would be as well to say nothing of my contributions to periodical literature, as Borrow had a great dislike to literary persons. My claim to that description being of the slightest, I quite gladly assented, and as a result George Borrow and I became on fairly friendly terms—or I had rather put it: the Gipsy King was less bearish to me than to some of the others with whom he was thrown into contact. I did not at that time understand his hostile attitude to contemporary professors of literature. I do now. Borrow had enjoyed for a brief period the questionable delights of being lionized in London society. His “Bible in Spain” had created a furore. An immense amount of curiosity was created as to the personality of a man who had gone through the extraordinary adventures described in that romantic book. For a couple of seasons Borrow was invited everywhere, and then as capriciously he was dropped. At the end of the sixties, when I met him, the hostesses who had fought with each other for his presence could not have told you whether the great man was alive or dead.

A big, broad-shouldered, slightly stooping man, with white hair, shaven face, and bushy eyebrows, was the George Borrow whom on a fine summer afternoon I met on the lawn at Coombe End. He was dressed in rusty broadcloth. At the moment he was about to take a walk across the common. He did me the honour to ask me to accompany him. The only book of his that I had read at that time was “The Bible in Spain.” It used to be given to me when I was quite a little boy as suitable Sunday reading. It was very unlike the general run of Sunday reading to which I had become accustomed. It was, indeed, a series of lurid adventures, hairbreadth escapes, desperate encounters, fire, thunder, murder, and sudden death—a boy’s book of the most pronounced type. And its title notwithstanding, I felt, even in those young days, that the incidents related must have been evolved by the teeming imagination of a novelist.

My first walk with Borrow confirmed me in the certainty of my childish instinct. Crude uncritical people, without a due respect for literary genius, would, on the strength of his conversation during that walk of mine, have characterized him offhand as a flamboyant liar. The true explanation is that he was continually evolving or devising incidents which, once given shape, remained with him as facts to be thenceforth remembered and related as occurrences duly observed. I feel sure that Borrow firmly believed that he had personally experienced all the eburescent transactions described in his “Bible in Spain.” On our way across the common he was accosted by a tramp. Borrow was infuriate. He invited the sturdy beggar to fight—he even began to divest himself of his broadcloth frock-coat; but the beggar made off. He was in search of benefactions, not of blows. Had the beggar been a gipsy, Borrow’s attitude would have been quite friendly. He would have, were it needed, administered to the wants of the swarthy nomad; but an English beggar was in the eyes of Borrow simply an habitual criminal, and as such should be soundly trounced whenever encountered.

In a road t’other side the common he took me into a beerhouse, and called for two half-pints of “swipes.” Thus in such places they call their thinnest, sourest, and cheapest ale. Borrow drank his as one enjoying a rare vintage. With difficulty I sipped a tipple, which I found to be simply villainous. In the far corner of the taproom sat a man at a table. He had finished his mug of ale, and was slumbering.

“See that fellow?” asked Borrow in an impressive stage whisper.“Yes,” I replied faintly, for the beer was positively making me ill.

“That man is a murderer. Finish your swipes. I’ll tell you all about it when we get out.”

And once out, he proceeded to tell me all about it. Here he was at his best. You could not help listening, admiring, and—almost—believing. It was so wonderfully done: the whole invented narrative, the squalid details, the sordid motive, the escape from justice owing to the presence on the jury of a friend of the prisoner, the verdict of “Not Guilty” rendered by an eleven of the vaunted Palladium starved into acquiescence by one determined boot-eater—all this the venerable old gentleman related with the utmost sincerity and circumstantiality.

On the following morning I took a walk across the common unaccompanied. I revisited the little swipe-shop. The man who had served us was behind the bar. He was the landlord. Did he recollect serving myself and another gentleman in the taproom on the previous afternoon? Of course he remembered. There was a third person in the taproom at the time? Of course there was. Did he know anything of that third person? Of course he did. Why, that was old William Mobbs, of Putney, carter to Mr. — (mentioning a market-gardener in the vicinity).

“Anything against him?” I inquired.

“Anything agin William Mobbs!” exclaimed mine host indignantly. “William is the most virtuosest man within a ragious of twenty mile! I b’leeve he’s the qui’test, law-abidin’est old bloke in the ’ole world.”

And in this way was Borrow’s murderer rehabilitated for me by one who knew him.

This visit of Borrow’s to Dr. Hake came to an abrupt close in a somewhat melodramatic way. Two families of gipsies set up an encampment on the common. Hosts who entertained Borrow in the country had to take their chance of an incident of that kind happening, for the gipsies seemed to scent their protector out. He spoke their language, he wrote their songs. By some of them he was known as their “King.” The presence of the nomadic tribe was immediately made known to Borrow by one of their dirty but intelligent scouts. The “King” thereupon made a call of ceremony upon his distinguished subjects. When he returned to Coombe End, he informed Dr. Hake that his friends the gipsies were in a difficulty about their water-supply, and that he had taken upon himself to give them permission to fill their buckets at the good doctor’s well. The good doctor consented with concealed misgiving. His fears were justified. The gipsies came on to his little estate, and not only took his water, but took away anything portable that happened to be lying around.

In his most courteous manner Dr. Hake told his illustrious guest what had happened. Borrow literally raged. The man who insulted his Romany friends insulted him. His friends were incapable of any act of ingratitude to a man whose hospitality he was accepting. But the worthy Hake insisted that, as a matter of mere fact, certain fowls, linen, and garden tools, had disappeared from the place at a time which synchronized with the Romany incursion. It was enough. The incensed “Lavengro” ordered his portmanteau to be packed and taken to the station. He flung out of the house, ignoring the kindly au revoir of his gentle host. After many moons he came to his senses again, and was reconciled to one of the most amiable, hospitable, and accomplished men of his time.

On two or three occasions after my introduction I met Borrow in town. He had apartments near the Museum. He was invariably civil. But this I attribute to the fact that I was able to talk pugilistic lore with him, and to introduce him to Nat Langham’s, a centre of “the fancy,” of the existence of which it surprised me to find so great an admirer of the P.R. completely ignorant. When I proposed this excursion we were in Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square, and Borrow had been met by me as he was walking along the side-path with a copy of the Old Testament in Hebrew held close to his failing eyes. He thrust the book into his pocket and accompanied me. I shrewdly suspect that this was the only occasion on which a Bible found its way into Nat Langham’s famous crib.Some time after Borrow’s death I was regularly engaged in writing for the newspapers, and it came in my way to make some inquiries concerning the circumstances under which he passed away. They were grim enough. In a lonely old farmhouse, situated by the whispering reeds of a Suffolk broad, he breathed his last. He was quite alone at the time when he was in extremis. And when at last the massive form was found lying there, cold and stark and dead, it was gathered up and pressed into a deal box. hastily put together by the village carpenter, and despatched by rail from the nearest railway-station—a sad and tragical ending, surely, for an imperious genius who had been in his day the lion of a London season, and whose writings have established a cult comparable only to that which has arisen over Fitzgerald and the libidinous old Persian philosopher, whom he made to live again in his wonderful paraphrase.

Of Dante Gabriel Rossetti I had but a passing glimpse. The poet-painter called on George Hake (a son of Borrow’s friend) when I happened to be stopping with him at Oxford. But the impression left is vivid enough. Six or seven years had passed since the bitter domestic bereavement had taken place which saddened his life and induced the habit that shortened his days. In appearance he presented neither the delicate, almost ascetic, figure of the early portraits nor the wan aspect of the later likenesses. One might have almost called him robust. He had the general aspect of a prosperous country squire. We all three chatted on current topics, and in Rossetti’s contributions to the talk he was now incisive and epigrammatic, and again fanciful and quaint. He was not for a moment pessimistic or bitter. The Rossetti presented to the public is, I know, a very different sort of individual. I can only repeat that I describe the man as I saw him during the closing years of the sixties.

Mr. Hall Caine presents a Rossetti of a very different sort. In a work of autobiography that popular writer devotes the greater portion of his book to a narrative of his relations with the poet. Mr. Caine became acquainted with the poet when his powers were decaying and his work practically finished; when he was habitually drugged and incapable of normal emotions; when he was deserted by his friends, and grateful for the companionship of almost anybody.

The literary venture of Mark Tapley Ainsworth failed to justify the auriferous future that his cousin, the novelist, had prophesied for it. The unfortunate owner was losing over it more money than he could afford. He called on me to announce the sad circumstance. He was as joyous as ever. He laughed merrily as he spoke of his bitter disappointment. I felt it impossible to sympathize with his mood. In my crass ignorance of the publishing world, the death of a magazine was a tragic thing. It affected me almost as the passing away of some eminent man. We lunched over the event (a sort of “wake,” it seemed to me) at the Blue Posts in Cork Street, and the proprietor of the magazine, the decease of which was about to be announced, was in the gayest of spirits. After all, the dear old chap may be excused at exhibiting some feeling of relief. It had been for him, as he cheerily explained, “a matter of always paying out, and never paying in.”

He certainly had not embarrassed himself by paying anything to me. But the regular occupation had been excellent practice, and the immediate ponderable result was the formation of a circle of acquaintances among literary men and artists. We drank, in excellent claret, to the resurrection of the dead periodical. But we honoured the toast as those who have no hope. Mark Tapley and I parted on excellent terms. We walked down the Burlington Arcade, and took leave of each other when we reached Piccadilly. His last word was a jape at the expense of himself and his venture. The last sound I heard of him was a particularly jolly laugh as he ambled off.

This collapse of the Ainsworthian magazine; my “call”; the removal from lodgings in Woburn Place to chambers in the Temple—these may be conveniently taken as roughly marking the end of my informal novitiate. I don’t know whether the habit of giving “call suppers” still persists. I was persuaded that the obligation to invite my friends to one was incumbent on me. The repast was ordered at my chambers for eight, and all my guests turned up. On the other side of Fleet Street, and nearly opposite Middle Temple Lane, was an oyster-house and restaurant called Prosser’s. At that establishment the supper was ordered. I regret to say that I recollect very little of the entertainment. My health was proposed, and a bright career at the Bar foretold for me by a gentleman who is now an ornament of the judicial bench. An artist present drew a picture entitled “Coke upon Littleton,” which evoked roars of laughter by reason of its audacious Rabelaisian humour. And an Hibernian journalist, who is now an English M.P., sang “The Wearin’ o’ the Green.” I replied—coherently—to the toast of my health. After that things became a trifle blurred. Prosser had done me too well.