LEARNING TO SWIM
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.