“Sassiaty is Sassiaty: its lors ar irresistibl.”—Yellowplush Papers.

Society journalism had been founded just before I began to earn a “living wage” in Fleet Street, but its development and popularity were items of later history. The ball was set rolling by Mr. Thomas Gibson Bowles—to become known in other times as the intractable Conservative Member of Parliament, and the beloved “Tommy” Bowles of the man in the street. The familiar sobriquet only got into print after Bowles captured King’s Lynn in the Tory interest, but he was called by that playful diminutive long before he entered the House of Commons, although he himself was probably unaware, as he would certainly resent, the fact. Pottinger Stephens bestowed upon him the familiar name, and in Fleet Street and the Strand he was always known to his Press contemporaries as “Tommy.”

That this gentleman should have turned Liberal in his old age, and that he should have captured his ancient Conservative stronghold in Lynn for the Rads, will not seem at all extraordinary to those who are a little behind the scenes. Those who accomplish a great deal for their party naturally expect that their party will do a little for them, provided they possess the necessary qualifications. Tommy certainly had the qualifications, and it is equally certain that he “put in” a lot of good work for the Tories; but he was never a persona grata with his leaders. The Conservatives are rather stupid on matters of birth and parentage, and Bowles did not come up to their standards. Having fought and lost two elections “on his own,” the party sent him down to a forlorn hope at Lynn. To their surprise and disgust he won the seat. For years he served the Tories loyally in Parliament, but when there came a division of loaves and fishes, Bowles was invariably left out of the reckoning. In the last Parliament in which he sat on the Conservative benches, he fell foul of his party, and personally attacked his hereditary leaders. From his place he alluded to the Salisbury administration as “the HÔtel Cecil,” and described the Front Bench as “a gallery of family portraits.”

Bowles acquired his knowledge of journalism and his respect for the conventions of Society on the Morning Post. He had started life, I believe, in Somerset House, which was just over the way, and he became imbued with the notion—a very profitable notion, as it turned out—that a paper chiefly devoted to the “hupper suckles,” written in their interests, and employing what he used to call “the passwords of Society,” should be a financial success. To what extent (at that period) Bowles was in Society, or how he obtained a knowledge of its passwords, or what those cryptic passwords were, I have never been able to find out; but, as one astute editorial admonition is “Know what you don’t know!” those same passwords may have been part of a pleasant myth.

His paper was duly launched at the price of twopence, and under the admirable title of Vanity Fair. But the paper, smartly and even wittily written as it was, would have failed to reach the somewhat inaccessible class for which its founder proposed to cater had it not been for his discovery of Pellegrini, and the appearance in Vanity Fair of that Italian artist’s inimitable cartoons. The price was raised to sixpence, the paper hit those remote circles for which it had been destined, “Tommy’s” career was assured, and Society journalism was established in our midst.

A tremendous number of imitators have sprung up from time to time—“they had their day, and ceased to be”—but there were only two other publications that enjoyed permanent success; and those two, with the first Society organ founded by Mr. Bowles, constituted, and still constitute, what is understood as Society journalism. The second paper in the trio was The World, founded by Edmund Yates; and the third was Truth, established by Henry Labouchere. I was fortunate enough to write for all three; for two of them I have written voluminously.

Bowles used to aver that he had no staff. He wrote a great deal of the paper himself, and his “Jehu Junior” articles, written to accompany the cartoons, were models of what essays should be. Light, epigrammatic, pungent, and excessively neat, they were the one possible accompaniment to “Ape’s” caricatures. A sentence from the “Jehu Junior” article always appeared beneath the picture. I can recall a couple. Beneath the first picture of Disraeli was inscribed: “He educated his party, and dished the Whigs to pass Reform, but to have become what he is from what he was is the greatest reform of all.” When Bishop Magee made his great speech in the House of Lords in defence of the Irish Church, his likeness appeared in the Vanity Fair gallery, and it had appended to it this extract from the article by Bowles: “If eloquence could justify injustice, he would have saved the Irish Church.” And the output of the able little editor was always up to sample.

Although Bowles professed to conduct his paper without the aid of a staff, he engaged regular contributors, which is pretty much the same thing. These gentlemen were never consulted in a body. “Collectivity” was never “pretty Fanny’s way,” as the Tory party, too late, discovered. But individual members of the body of contributors were occasionally summoned to meet their editor and proprietor at his chambers. When I was first ushered into the august presence, Bowles had rooms in Palace Chambers, at the corner of St. James’s Street, over against the Palace itself. He had just commenced his yachting career at that period, and adopted the mariner’s pose ashore to the extent of receiving you in his bare feet—to give the impression, I suppose, of rolling seas and a slippery deck.

But if one did not meet one’s confreres in the rooms of the editor, we were bound to encounter in the outer world—perhaps at the printer’s or elsewhere. The printer was Peter Rankin, of Drury Court—a dour and adventurous Scot who, having conveyed a newspaper by means of registration from its rightful owner, continued the management of the property on his own account. He had not the success which usually attends these Napoleonic sportsmen in the Street of Adventure. He came to grief and death, and nobody seemed to care. At his printing-offices I met for the first time Willmott Dixon, then a contributor under the Bowles banner. Dixon was at that time a fresh-coloured, stout, broad-shouldered man with an indomitably sweet temper which indicated its permanence in a dimple in the cheek.

Willmott Dixon had brought into Fleet Street with him much of the ebullient spirit and readiness for practical fun for which he was noted at Cambridge in his undergraduate days. Bon-vivant, raconteur, and essentially good fellow, he was in general demand as a companion. After the days of our Vanity, I was associated with Dixon on many other papers, for he had the pen of a ready writer, and was in considerable demand. Of all the men I have known, he was the quickest producer of “copy,” and he seemed capable of coming up with his tale of work under any and all conditions. His sporting articles and stories under the nom de plume of “Thormanby” are well known, and his accounts of the old prize-fights are the best ever written. The amount of “copy” produced by Dixon would equal that of any three ordinary journalists, taking a period of years in the productive stage of each. But why should I speak of Willmott Dixon in the past tense? He is now a hale young fellow of seventy, and within the last few years he has published three successful novels under his own name, one collection of sporting stories under his nom de plume of “Thormanby,” and an autobiography entitled “The Spice of Life.” This is the sort of veteran whom Mr. Philip Gibbs should take down Fleet Street with him one fine day, with the idea of presenting him to the young gentlemen who weep and have hysterics when a newspaper happens to put up the shutters. Very few, I imagine, of the invertebrate Press gang of the period will be writing saleable novels at seventy!Henry Pottinger Stephens, another of Vanity’s regular contributors, I first met at the office of the publisher. We were both there on the same errand, I believe, stalking an oof bird. Stephens had just returned from Paris, where he had been acting as one of the correspondents of the Times. He also was to be my associate in other papers, my companion in other adventures. To these I may recur in another chapter.

At what date it was I forget, but in the early eighties Bowles sold the paper to Arthur Evans. The price was, I think, £20,000. With this Bowles started the Lady, which, if not perhaps quite his own line of country, promised a bigger income than would ever be obtainable from his original venture. Under the new regime I continued to contribute. The proprietor confined his attention to the City article. The literary part of the paper was under Mr. Oliver Fry. From the time of the founding of Vanity Fair until its purchase half a dozen years ago by the Harmsworths—a period of, say, forty years—it had but two editors. Thus, the traditions of the paper were regarded, its tone and policy were continuous, and it retained in consequence its old subscribers and its old advertisers. An editorial chair held in forty years by two editors in succession marks a record. There were several editors during the Harmsworth epoch. But the new atmosphere did not seem to suit the old growth. It was sold again. The cartoons have always been the mainstay and chief attraction of Vanity Fair. When dear old Pellegrini died, Bowles had discovered an accomplished successor in “Spy.” Over this name Mr. Leslie Ward drew almost continuously for the paper for many years. Indeed, his work has appeared there up to a comparatively recent date.

When Edmund Yates founded the World, a departure in Society journalism was made. The new candidate for popular favour was to depend on its writing alone for its success. Yates had no misgivings about the propriety of engaging a staff. Bowles always held himself aloof from, and socially superior to, the Fleet Street man. Yates had been a Fleet Street man himself, and was unlikely to make that mistake. He liked to meet his contributors socially. He was at one with them. And they had an immense liking for their chief. For, although Yates was as savage as a Mohawk when he “went for” his enemies, he was devoted to his friends. Not infrequently, in the journalistic world, you will come upon soft-hearted sayers of hard-hearted things. Yates was a man of that sort. Warm in his friendships, genial in his manner, sympathetic to the tyro, he was out for scalps the moment he scented a hint of offence—it mattered not whether the offence was intended for him or for one of his friends.

In the inception of his “Journal for Men and Women,” Yates had the assistance of Henry Labouchere and Grenville Murray. And among the principal writers engaged to support the new venture were Bernard Becker, Henry Pearse, Dutton Cook, and Christie Murray. A. M. Broadley did not join till later on, I think; though when he did join he proved himself extremely useful in picking up those Society items upon which the World depended very much in the effort to prove acceptable to the “classes.”

Yates liked to have about him as staff officers men of goodly presence, gentlemanly address. And he had a horror of anything soiled or slovenly in the attire of his contributors. This latter characteristic of the World’s editor accounted for the engagement of lady journalists. It was, indeed, the paragraph of one of his women contributors that involved him in the criminal libel suit brought by Lord Lonsdale, resulting in the incarceration of Yates in Holloway—a severe punishment in respect of a stupid little paragraph, and a punishment the effects of which Yates carried with him to his dying day. There was one of the contributors who scarcely came up to the standard of physique which the editor regarded as desirable. This was Mr. (now Sir) H. W. Lucy. Yates gave that gentleman his first great chance of showing his paces as an independent descriptive reporter of proceedings in the House of Commons. Lucy’s weekly contribution was entitled “Under the Clock, by one of the Hands.” The title was supplied by the chief.Lucy was a smart little fellow of tremendous industry and always conscious of his own ability to make his way in the world. His hair, turning grey even in that far-off time, stood up like the quills of the porcupine. He always gave you the impression of a man who had suddenly waked up in a fright. And the expression that seemed his normal one was that of a gentle surprise. He became, at another stage in his successful career, associated with a little Irishman—Mr. Harry Furniss—an artist for some time connected with Punch. It was a very quaint sight to see the two little chaps pottering through an art gallery in search of subjects for their merciless ridicule. Furniss, red-headed and rotund of paunch, looking like a sort of duodecimo edition of a City Alderman, whispered his jokes to his companion, accompanying the witticisms with an engaging smile, Lucy accepting them with his habitual look of gentle wonder.

Yates himself wrote the neatest, most scintillating, and most readable paragraphs of any man who has ever essayed that extraordinarily difficult art. But neither the appeal to Society, nor the descriptive pictures of Parliament, nor the now sparkling and now vitriolic paragraphs of the editor, brought on that happy event which is known in the newspaper world as “turning the corner.” That is the happy moment when the paper becomes increased in circulation, and advertising returns to the point at which it pays. It is always the unexpected that happens, and the contributions which raised the World from the commercial Slough of Despond were a remarkable series of articles on “West End Usurers,” attributed to Mr. Henry Labouchere. As a matter of fact, however, the material was collected by several persons, and I understood at the time that the proofs were submitted to Sir George Lewis before they were passed for the press.

Judging from the style in which some of them were written, concerning men notoriously wealthy, their filtration through Ely Place was an entirely necessary proceeding. When the victim was unlikely to resent attack or attempt reprisals, the onset was at times very warm indeed. Poor Hubert Jay Maurice was one of these latter. One never knew what the dapper gentleman’s real name was—probably Moses. He had been known as Mr. Jay and as Mr. Maurice. And he ended his days as Mr. Didcot, a music-hall agent, having succeeded in giving his only daughter in marriage to the cadet of a noble house. The Didcot article appeared during Christmas week, and ended with the pregnant sentence: “Indeed, this young man’s career has been so shameless that at this festive season of the year we will not ask our compositors to set it up in print.”

The success of the World once secured, the circulation went up by leaps and bounds, and Mr. Labouchere, quick to appreciate the effect of his own suggestion, and willing to secure for himself the profits to be made by exhibiting and denouncing the evil that is in the world, soon determined to run a paper of his own. This was Truth, the third in the triad of publications that made good a claim to the title of Society journals. Labouchere went to work very carefully and systematically in founding the journal which will always be associated with his name—a journal, it should be at once admitted, which, while it did much in the way of airing personal dislikes, did much more in ridding Society of pests and parasites, of swindlers and charlatans, than any other journal of our time.

My friend Robert Williams was consulted concerning the founding of the new paper. And from him I used to hear how matters were progressing. From him, for example, I learned that Mr. Horace Voules, of the Echo, had accepted the position of manager to the new venture. Voules always reminded me of the description of another Mr. Vholes as described in “Bleak House.” You recall the passage, perhaps? “If you want common-sense, responsibility, respectability, all united—Vholes is the man!” Williams was fond of telling a story of the interview between Labouchere and Voules at the time of the engagement. The story was ben trovato. But my own subsequent acquaintance with Mr. Voules convinced me that there was not any element of fact in it. The dialogue as reported by “Bobbos” ran thus:

Labouchere: “I understand, Mr. Voules, that, in dealing with the outside public, you are apt to be rather haughty in your manner?”

Voules: “Indeed!”

Labouchere: “Now, in your interviews with my little public, I desire that you will tone yourself down a little toward their level.”

Voules (bridling, but dignified): “Mr. Labouchere, ’aughty I never ham; but I ’ope I ’ave a proper pride.”

I can testify personally that, when I knew him, Horace Voules was perfectly sound in the matter of his aspirates. To me, indeed, he appeared to be over-solicitous about them.

No sooner had “Labby,” as he began to be called, got his venture launched, than he opened an attack on the owners of the Daily Telegraph in the most systematic, sustained, and unrelenting vein of personal journalism. Mr. Labouchere’s memoirs, which are in hand, may perhaps relate that old story. It is no business of mine to stir up the puddle. Man of the world, politician, diplomatist, cool-headed as Labouchere had always proved himself, he here undoubtedly permitted himself to be betrayed into a series of libels on an old friend, which were in no way creditable to him. His attacks thereafter were legitimate crusades against the undetected jackals who prey on the public. And the public is considerably in his debt in respect of them. While as to his more piquant and personal libels, it must be reluctantly admitted that their appearance and the circumstances which resulted from them added considerably to the jocundity of those Fleet Street days.

There were quite a number of stories current then as illustrating the delightful insouciance of Labouchere. Here are four of them:

When he was in the diplomatic service, he was sent on a mission to St. Petersburg. Before starting he had a dispute with the Foreign Office about his expenses. F.O. had its idea of the scale; Labouchere had his. But the Office refused to reconsider its decision. Labouchere took his leave, crossed the Channel, and was, to all appearance, lost. A week after the appointed time he had not arrived at St. Petersburg. A representative of F.O. was sent out on his trail. He was traced to Paris, and from thence to Vienna, where he was run to earth. In reply to his discoverer, he coolly said:

“The Foreign Office refused to pay me my expenses, and I’m walking to St. Petersburg.”

He was at one time AttachÉ at our Embassy in Washington. The Minister was suddenly recalled to London, and Labouchere was left in charge. On the morning following the departure of the Ambassador, one of the members of the United States Government called. “Minister in?” he inquired curtly of Labouchere. “Not in,” replied Labby, lighting a cigarette. “Guess I’ll call again,” said the big politician. “Ah, do!” said Labouchere sweetly. An hour afterwards the same Great Man again put in an appearance. “Minister in yet?” he inquired sharply. “Not yet,” answered Labouchere from behind the paper which he was reading. “Can you give me any idea when he will be back?” asked the important senator impatiently. “I haven’t the remotest idea: he sailed for Europe yesterday,” was the soft answer not altogether calculated to turn away wrath.

When he stood for Northampton, Labouchere’s colleague was Charles Bradlaugh, who frankly avowed his atheism to the shoemakers and other horny-handed artisans who were his supporters. Now, Labouchere, who was an old campaigner, knew that the Liberals of the constituency would not stand two atheists. The moment his address was circulated, the Nonconformists took fright, and, although religious topics were altogether absent from the astute candidate’s pronunciamento, eager Dissent sniffed heterodoxy in every line of it. Labouchere thereupon sat down and wrote an autograph letter to every Nonconformist divine, on the register and off it, asking each of them to meet him, and for the purpose of discussing those topics which all good Liberals hold dear. He hired the biggest room in his hotel. He had a line of chairs drawn up in uncompromising rows along the two principal side-walls. At the end of the room was a table with a tumbler and a carafe of water. Lying promiscuously around were copies of the Daily News and the Christian World. The invited ministers turned up to a man. The candidate’s agent met them and conducted them, with every demonstration of respect, to the seats allotted to them. When Labouchere, waiting in an ante-chamber, was informed that they were all come, he entered the room. He bowed right and left, a sad smile on his lips, a black suit enveloping his person, and a general air of Chadband emanating from all parts of him. He took his place behind the table, poured out a tumbler of water, drank it down with all the gusto of one who thoroughly enjoyed it, and forthwith addressed his sad audience.

“My reverend friends,” he began, “I have invited you to meet me in order that we may interchange views on those topics which are of first-class importance to Liberals, and more especially to Liberals attached to the great, influential Nonconforming bodies. But before proceeding to the consideration of mere worldly matters, I shall ask the Reverend Mr. So-and-So to engage in a few words of prayer, beseeching the Lord’s blessing on our deliberations.”

That did the trick for him at Northampton.

“That gentleman an atheist!” said the Reverend Mr. So-and-So to a friend as they left the hotel. “He’s the first political candidate I ever knew to ask the Divine guidance in his campaign. He shall have my vote and my—er—little influence.”

Those who know anything about the depth of Labouchere’s religious feelings and the extent of his personal affection for Dissenters will best appreciate the humour of the situation.

When Labouchere was member for Middlesex—that was long before the Northampton days—the Lord Taunton who sat in the Upper House was his uncle. A member of the House of Commons who had mistaken the relationship addressed Labouchere one day on the Lobby.

“Ah, Labouchere,” he said, “I’ve just been in the other House, and I heard your father deliver a most admirable address.”“I’m more than pleased to hear it,” said Labby; “for my father has been dead these ten years, and until the present moment I never knew where he had got to!”

Between Labouchere on Truth and Yates on the World there commenced a species of “snacking” or sparring which promised from time to time a rush into active and bitter hostilities. The paragraphs of one paper bristled with allusions to the slips of “Edmund,” and the other paper retorted racily on “Henry,” and we all looked out eagerly for an outbreak of real hostility; but it never came. The doughty champions both feared and respected each other, and they expended any gall which they may have secreted during their meditations on other victims. The papers still adhere pretty nearly to the lines laid down by their founders, though lacking the personal supervision of those distinguished editors. Yates died suddenly—tragically—on leaving the stalls of a theatre, and Labouchere, abandoning both the senate and the editorial seat, retired to Florence, where he recently died. The memoirs of “Labby” should be a stimulating and piquant collection.

The complete success of the three papers about which I have been writing naturally provoked a considerable amount of the sincerest form of flattery, and imitators sprang up like mushrooms, willing to share the rewards apparently reserved for those who catered for Society. These misguided adventurers discovered too late that even a Society editor must have his aptitudes—his special qualifications. Some of the new candidates for popular favour died the death. Others of them—dumb witnesses to that hope that “springs eternal in the human breast”—never in their lives arrived at paying-point, yet exist to this day. They pass from proprietor to proprietor. No one ever hears at what price they change hands. No one ever sees a copy sold on a stall. There is no trace of their existence in the clubs. Now and then one comes upon a back number in the coffee-room of an hotel. They are the pathetic derelicts of the Press—the pariahs of journalism. They persist by reason of their absolute badness. Their persistence recalls the inference set forth in the lines of Henry S. Leigh’s verses about Uncle John:

“If Uncle John goes living on,
How wicked Uncle John must be!”

It is amusing to note how proprietors, editors, and contributors, will differ as to the motive power which has given the first substantial rise in circulation. Voules always held—he has told me so a dozen times—that the success of Truth was brought about by the fashion articles of “Madge.” And Lucy of the World became possessed by the belief that the popularity of the Yates venture was partly due to the appearance therein of his articles from the gallery of the House of Commons. He determined to establish a paper on the lines laid down by Yates. And his leading article was to be his own series, entitled “Under the Clock, by One of the Hands.”

Lucy selected Mayfair as the name of the venture on which he was about to embark. There should be no mistake about his title to rank as a Society journalist. In that matter he could ruffle it with the best of them. He was, however, beset with difficulties from the beginning. In the first place—to his immense surprise and disgust—he found that Yates entirely declined to abandon his right in the heading of the Parliamentary articles, which continued to appear, from another “Hand,” until long after the death and burial of Lucy’s bantling.

Lucy found certain members of the staff of Mayfair intractable; the intractable aids declared that they found things impossible. And no one was greatly surprised when the new purveyor of social wares put the shutters up. Incidentally, Mr. Lucy’s paper was the means of enriching that harvest of English literature which is garnered by Mudie. It led to the publication of a couple of novels. In one of these works Mr. Lucy drew a character which was instantly recognized as a portrait of Mr. Christie Murray. Murray had been one of the intractables on the strength of the Mayfair. Christie was not only impatient of attack, but he was very well equipped for hitting back, which in due course he proceeded to do. Anyone interested in the literary amenities of the jocund days may find some diversion in referring to Christie Murray’s “The Way of the World.” Such merry jousts are inadmissible in these less strenuous times.

A much longer period of existence was granted to the St. Stephen’s Review, founded by Mr. William Alison. In the editorial scheme, this organ was to play Parliamentary measures—so to speak—in addition to its piping for Society. Its political cartoons by Tom Merry did good service on more than one electoral campaign. Alison was a member of the Junior Carlton Club, so that it is needless to indicate the policy for which his paper stood. Alison had chosen for his sub-editor one of the strangest of the strange persons who crowd the journalistic mart. His name was William Tasker. He wrote vapid verses and slushy prose by the ream, over the name of “Edgar Lee.” But if his literary output was of a middling sort, his lying was first-rate. He had become so much the servant of the habit that he often believed his own stories. Alison never contradicted him, and so the faculty increased, and the facility acquired by the little professor became quite marvellous. He was an extremely ill-dressed man, and grew the mutton-chop face fungi for which Frank Richardson affects such a distaste. He always wore a red tie, and it was always a soiled one. A bland, propitiatory smile played about the corners of his mouth. He would rush up to one in the Strand with this sort of news: “I’ve just been to Downing Street, and Disraeli told me—this is quite private, mind you—that he’ll go to the country in June.” The reply might be: “Hang it all! I’ve just left the House of Commons. Dizzy is on his feet, and has been for the last three-quarters of an hour.” But that sort of facer never disturbed Tasker. He would shake his head and smile a deprecatory smile, as he answered: “Optical illusion, my dear fellow. I tell you I’ve just left him in Downing Street. I mentioned your name to him, and he said: ‘Sound man that; give him my regards.’ And I said I would, and so I have.” I have heard him tell, with every detail, of his sprinting prowess. He could not run fifty yards. And he would descant on his success on the race-course, who did not know the meaning of a handicap. He survived for some years the passing of the journal with which he was associated. These he devoted to palmistry, astrology, and other wizard sciences, the profession of which, to a scientist knowing how to advertise—and where—may, even in these advanced days, yield a living of sorts.

But the surpassing claim of the St. Stephen’s Review to the respectful regard of posterity is the fact that it introduced Phil May to the British public. A Bohemian of Bohemians was Phil May when he was discovered, and a Bohemian of Bohemians he continued to the end—the all too early end. When he began to contribute to Alison’s paper, he was engaged in designing dresses for Alias the costumier. Alias had some funny stories about the difficulty he experienced in keeping Phil at his work. One day he arrived at the office having come through a heavy shower of rain. His boots, coat, and hat, were soaked. The humane little employer fussed about, induced him to remove his boots and coat, and provided him with slippers and a studio jacket. “I shall ’ave them dried,” he explained as he hurried off. The dear little chap, however, locked them up, assured that Phil May would not venture abroad without his boots and coat and hat. The hour was eleven of the forenoon. The programme of Alias was to hurry off, see his customers at one or two theatres, and return about one o’clock and take Phil—who he hoped would then have made several good designs—out to lunch. Passing Romano’s, he thought he would turn in and take a liqueur of brandy. He entered. There were shouts of laughter at the end of the bar. In the midst of an admiring crowd of “the boys” stood Phil May, fully attired in the costumier’s stock. He wore red Hessian boots to beyond his knees. On his head was the shako of a gendarme, and his slim figure was enveloped in a brigand cloak built for a big man. Of course the designs of the dresses had not been touched.

“I came here to see if they had got my boots,” Phil explained to the exasperated costumier. “Will you take anything?”“I vill take You!” replied the little man, leading his designer into the Strand, where they were followed to the shop by a delighted crowd of urchins, who were divided in opinion as to whether the thin gentleman in costume was “Awthur Roberts” or “’Enery Hirving.”

When Phil had “come into his own,” when he was the favourite artist on Punch—favourite of the public, that is to say—he continued in the Bohemian courses which he had acquired in the lean and struggling years. At one time he was ordered horse exercise; and when he got the horse, it was thought, by the authorities at home, that it would be an excellent idea for Phil if he went into Fleet Street on horseback when business took him that way. This, it was thought, would insure his safe and early return to the domestic hearth. It answered well—for a bit. But one afternoon Phil was riding home from Fleet Street to his house in Kensington, and in passing through Leicester Square, thought that he would drop in at the “Cosy Club,” a small club then recently founded. He gave his horse in charge of an urchin to hold for him. It was then four in the afternoon. At two o’clock in the morning a police constable entered the club to inquire whether one of the members had left a horse in charge of a boy outside. The secretary remembered that May was the proud possessor of a steed. But May had left the club at midnight. He had forgotten all about his horse, and had driven home in a hansom.

Of the making of penny Society papers there was no end. But of those papers themselves there was generally an early end, and of these one may more conveniently treat in the chapter “De Mortuis.”