Whalley took me to visit his adipose protégé in a street in Pimlico.  I think it was called Bessborough Street; I recollect that it was a continuation of Tachbrook Street.  Here “Sir Roger” had installed Miss Norrie Jordan, a member of the chorus at the Globe Theatre, in control of his domestic arrangements, “Lady Tichborne” being provided for elsewhere.  This was quite characteristic of the Claimant.  He had not the slightest affection for Miss Jordan, and appeared to feel uncomfortable in her presence.  But it was the fashion for gentlemen of title to run “side-shows,” as they were called; and “Sir Roger” was determined to stand by his order, and show himself a man sensitive to the slightest movements of Society, however personally unpleasant to himself the experiments involved might be.

My subsequent meetings with the fellow proved to me that the sum of his so-called accomplishments might be set down in a line or two.  He had an unbounded capacity for swallowing gin-and-soda; he had a good eye and a steady hand as a pigeon-shot; and he possessed an unrivalled faculty for exploiting “mugs.”  In dealing with possible subscribers to the Tichborne “stock,” it was a favourite ruse of his to ask the intended victim to try on the Claimant’s gloves.  This trial proved that the hands of the Claimant were small, whereas those of Orton were said to have been large.  When the “unfortunate nobleman” went to Dartmoor to “languish” for a term of years, it was a great relief to the Press and an infinite advantage to the community at large.

He had indeed proved himself the very Prince of Jokers, but his joke had begun to pall.

James Ansdell was a retired Cape merchant.  He was a genial, generous, and clever little man, and bore a somewhat striking facial resemblance to Livingstone the explorer.  Why on earth James Ansdell, with a fine income and all the world open to him as an oblate spheroid of a pleasure-garden, should have selected Anderton’s Hotel in Fleet Street as the resort, of all others, to afford him the greatest amount of diversion, I have never been able to discover.  But in the smoking-room of Anderton’s some five-and-twenty years ago Ansdell was to be found on every afternoon after lunch, surrounded by a little coterie of pressmen, Fleet Street nondescripts, and Cape cronies.  He established himself as host of the table; and in those days that in itself was a passport to the less strenuously occupied of the journalists.  Ansdell was always sure of a full company, and as he was not only a good talker, but a good listener, conversation for conversation’s sake was greatly encouraged, and time passed swiftly and agreeably enough over the Cape merchant’s coffees and whiskies and cigars.

Ansdell had met Alfred Geary at the Cape—about Geary I shall have a little to say in my next chapter—and I suppose that to Geary he was indebted for the introductions which enabled him to establish his “afternoons.”  My opportunities of joining Ansdell’s circle were infrequent.  The journalist of larger leisure, a smaller sense of responsibility, and more mercurial temperament, found the Ansdell reunions extremely to his taste.  And there can be no doubt that the founder of the “afternoons” had contrived to surround himself with some very interesting characters.

The last occasion on which I saw the poet was on the day on which the papers announced that the Laureateship, vacant for some time by the death of Tennyson, had been bestowed upon Mr. Austin.  He was overwhelmed with grief and chagrin—grief, that a post so manifestly adapted to his own genius should have been given to another; chagrin, because the office had been given to one whom he regarded as his own inferior.  His idea was that I should obtain for him permission, from the conductors of a journal with which I was then connected, to write the new appointment down.  He was greatly incensed, I remember, by my asking him whether it mattered very much who was appointed or whether any appointment whatever were made.

“It is the cynical act of a Minister who has made science his hobby.  What sort of a taste for literature can be expected to be acquired in Lord Salisbury’s laboratories at Hatfield?”

“A taste for literary retorts,” I suggested.  But he would not allow the momentous subject to be side-tracked by a mere verbal pleasantry.

“I tell you,” he persisted, “it’s a filthy political job.  Austin has been officially honoured, not on account of his poems, but as a reward for his Conservative leaders in the Standard.  This great office has been flung like a bone to a dog by a cynical and unscrupulous Minister.”

The most picturesque figure at these informal assemblies was Brigadier-General McIver.  In what service this Caledonian swashbuckler earned his last distinction I forget, but the reader will find the details in an autobiography of the General entitled “Under Fourteen Flags.”  From the very title of the book it will be deduced that the General was impartial in his sympathies, and that his good sword was at the disposal of any nationality that was disposed to pay for it.  In that autobiographical work the author is somewhat reticent about his life previous to the date at which he received his first command.  From personal observation of the gallant officer, I should be inclined to say that he had served in the ranks as a British Tommy, and that, having a real taste for soldiering, and finding the rate of promotion in the ranks vastly too slow for his aspirations, he had left the home forces, and placed his services at the disposal of those struggling nationalities which are so often only too glad to accord high commissions to Englishmen or Scotsmen or Irishmen willing to serve under their flags.  His whole bearing, dialect, and appearance, was that of the ranker.

The successes of the gallant General in war were only less renowned than his successes in love—that is to say, from the General’s own not very lofty point of view.  His intrigues were, indeed, of a somewhat squalid character, occasionally involving the professional disqualification of the “slavey” at his lodgings, and his own temporary disappearance from his Fleet Street haunts.

He was a tall, muscular, well-knit, soldierly-looking man with a cavalry moustache and big imperial.  His accent was that of the Lowland Scot.  On one of Ansdell’s afternoons the General, “intoxicated,” to use a famous phrase, “by the exuberance of his own verbosity,” or from other causes, retired from the convivial circle, and stretched himself out to rest on a couch at the end of the room.  While “he lay like a warrior taking his rest,” some habitués of the room decorated the face of the sleeping hero with burnt cork and red paint, and when their artistic work had been effected McIver looked more like a Sioux Indian on the war-path than a Scots free-lance seeking repose.  Hours afterwards he woke, and found himself in a smoking-room now filled with strangers.  A loud laugh greeted his appearance when he arose—a giant refreshed.  There could be no mistake that the laughter was directed against him.  In his most heroic vein he demanded the cause of the company’s hilarity, and was referred to the mirror that was fixed above the fireplace.

Mr. Gladstone—the G.O.M., I mean—was accustomed to ask strange people to his breakfast-table.  But no stranger guest did he ever entertain than when McIver sat with him at that meal to give the great statesman his experiences in the Balkan States.  Gladstone welcomed anyone who could give him the slightest information regarding what were known in the eighties as “Bulgarian atrocities,” and the Brigadier-General returned to England reputedly abounding with reliable news from that part of Europe.  If Mr. Gladstone was greatly in the habit of taking his facts about the Eastern Question from authorities of the McIver kidney, it is little wonder that he led his countrymen astray when he inflamed their passions on the topic of atrocities with which he had become obsessed.

A year or two since I saw the death of the hero of the “Fourteen Flags” announced in the Daily Telegraph.  It was followed by quite a flattering obituary notice of the deceased officer.  His many deeds of valour were referred to in terms which must have made all his friends regret that the tribute should have been delayed till the man himself was no longer alive to read it.

I have quoted above the initials G.O.M. as applied to Mr. Gladstone, and standing, of course, for “Grand Old Man.”  Another and less reverent reading of the initials was given by one of Gladstone’s most devoted supporters, Mr. Labouchere.  It must have been at a time when the doctors had stopped “Henry’s” cigarettes, or perhaps during one of those periods of shuffling the Ministerial cards when Labouchere felt annoyed at having his claims to office once more disregarded.  Whatever the cause, to Mr. Henry Labouchere was quite rightly attributed the translation of G.O.M. into “God’s only mistake!”

The Squire lived for six months, and then fizzled out, the savings of poor old Morgan Evans having fizzled out too.  He then returned to the unprofitable, but more congenial, rôle of casual contributor to the Press.  During the last months of his life he did little and suffered much, and the end came mercifully and quickly.  Evans was a rather short, yellow-bearded man, with a gentle voice and a most engaging smile.  He hailed from the Principality, but was not at all of the type of Welshman that now affrights the imagination of the English.

An occasional visitor to Ansdell’s table was A. K. Moore.  At that time Moore also was among those who wielded the free-lance.  Among the journals that sometimes accepted his contributions was Punch.  But Fleet Street was a long time discovering Moore’s merits.  He was a graduate of Dublin University and a graduate of Oxford.  He was an Irishman, he possessed a fine sense of humour, wrote a lucid, vigorous style, yet had to wait many years for a recognition of his gifts.  When at last “he came into his own” by being appointed Editor of the Morning Post, he proved himself to possess all that his journalistic friends in Fleet Street claimed for him; but I imagine that it was a man somewhat soured by waiting who took command in the editorial sanctum of the Post.  His duties were, however, discharged not only with fidelity, but with conspicuous ability, and the paper prospered greatly in his hands.  He died in harness.

Ansdell, the chairman of these afternoon reunions, was a widower.  When he took to himself a second wife, Cruikshank junior regarded it as something in the nature of a personal affront that the permission of the circle at Anderton’s had not been obtained in the first place.  Perhaps Ansdell knew that George would never give his consent.  At all events, he got married without asking for it.  The agreeable afternoon functions were broken up, and Fleet Street knew James Ansdell no more.

The smoking-room at Anderton’s Hotel is abundantly provided with windows at the back, and over the front part of it, which is cut off from the back by a partition, there is a dome light.  But the place is so built in that the walls of neighbouring erections cut off the sunlight, and on the brightest days this particular apartment is always tenebrious.  On gloomy days the artificial lights are switched on.  At Anderton’s Hotel the redoubtable Richard Pigott spent some of the last days of his smirched career, and the smoking-room was the favourite resort of the devoted forger.

He was a most benevolent-looking rascal.  His white beard and whiskers were carefully trimmed; his rubicund face was invariably wreathed with smiles; his portly figure had an aldermanic contour; and altogether he suggested the railway director or the rich stage uncle.  No one would have taken him for the editor of a tenth-rate provincial paper, or the clumsy forger who was so careless in his criminality as to sign his victim’s name at the top rather than at the bottom of a letter on the acceptance of which everything depended.

Once I met him in Coventry Street late at night, and asked him into the American Bar of the Criterion.  He hesitated a good deal before accepting my invitation, and was evidently ill at ease while he remained there with me.  He was greatly disconcerted by the apparent interest which two men who were drinking cocktails were taking in him.  They certainly looked our way and whispered together.  Pigott took leave of me hurriedly and left the place.  I called on him next day, desirous, if possible, of ascertaining his exact suspicion about the men, whose presence had so obviously disturbed him, and their connection with a conspiracy of which he was obviously in dread.  But Pigott could be as close as an oyster when he desired.  He assured me that he had not particularly noticed anyone at the Criterion, and explained that he never really liked the place.  The “company is so mixed, you see,” declared the venerable liar.

His flight to Spain, and his suicide when his pursuers were close on his trail—these are matters of history.  That which is not quite a matter of history is an incident redounding very much to the charity and humanity of Mr. Labouchere.  It will be recollected, perhaps, that the exposure and flight of the traitor and forger were brought about at a conference which he had with Sala and Labouchere at the house of the latter.  That which has gone unrecorded is that Labouchere charged himself with the maintenance of the dead man’s children.

It was curious to note the effect of the exposure of the Pigott forgeries on the London public.  The Man in the Street came out very strong on the occasion.  Up to that time Parnell was a much-hated politician.  But your Cockney has fine sporting instincts always, and the finest instinct of the sportsman is a love of fair-play.  It was felt now that a deadly wrong had been done to the leader of the Irish people—for leader of the Irish party he never was and never pretended to be.  He led the people; but he drove the party like a herd of pigs.  I was on the steps of the Royal Courts when Parnell came out after the disclosure.  Quite a crowd of people were assembled on the pavement.  Parnell was accompanied by George Lewis.  On the appearance of the lawyer and his client, quite a hearty cheer was raised.  The eminent solicitor—usually so impassive—was quite evidently moved and pleased.  But Parnell passed on untouched, sphinx-like, contemptuous.  As far as he was concerned there might have been no demonstration, no expression of sympathy, no British public at all.  Tall, gaunt, unbending, he moved on, a sad, lonely figure of a man, I thought.  His, however, was the immobility that covered a very genuine sense of power.

“What is there about which you particularly want to know?” asked Parnell.

“Well,” said the interviewer, “my people are anxious to ascertain your present attitude with regard to Mr. Gladstone.”

“Oh, the old man?” said Parnell coolly, and dropping the “grand” which usually accompanied the words.  “You can tell your people, if you like, that the old man has made three mistakes with me.”

“Yes,” said the other eagerly.

“The first was when he put me into gaol; the second was when he let me out; and the third was when he went into business with me and thought to get the better of me.”

But I have wandered some few perches from Anderton’s.  I return.  My last visit to that hotel was with the late Dr. Tanner, a Member for Mid-Cork.  His brother had committed suicide there by injecting morphia.  The deceased gentleman, Dr. Lombard Tanner, was an extremely jovial and good-looking Irishman.  He had got into entanglements—not of a financial, but of the other kind—and he saw no way out but this.  I had been an intimate friend of his.  But he sought advice neither from friends nor relatives.  The memory for me will always remain gruesome and ineffaceable.  For before the inquest the coroner’s officer handed me a letter-card addressed to me by poor Lombard, which was written, as to the first part, just before he commenced the injection, and, as to the last part, ending blurred and incoherent, while the drug was taking effect.  He wished me to accept his sword and certain other effects which he had left at his room, in St. James’s Place, St. James’s, and to bid me farewell!

This is, I confess, a sad note on which to close a chapter, but even the most jocund periods have their short sharp moments of tragedy.

Fleet Street is haunted by the ghosts of dead newspapers.  At midnight they flit—in white sheets, of course—out of the doors and windows of old offices in the thoroughfare itself, and in the tributary lanes and streets and courts that flow into it.  You may—if you have a good reliable imagination—catch the glimmer of their silent passage as they scurry back to their long homes.  Poor sheeted dead! once so full of life and hope and confidence, but cut down untimely, and fated to revisit the scenes of their short but well-meant labours!

When my time comes to go, I shall not be able to leave my children much money; but I can—and will—leave them a lot of good advice.  Should one of them determine to try his fortune in Fleet Street—a course which I should deplore—I would advise that devoted child of mine to keep a diary.  Had I adopted this precaution, I should now be in a position to fix an exact date to every incident and anecdote related in these chronicles, and to record a hundred others which have escaped my memory.  And for the purposes of this particular chapter I should be in a position to give the names, dates, and careers, of all the dead newspapers I have known during their brief stay on earth.

“My son, when sinners entice thee to found a newpaper, be sure you do not call it after the name of a bird.”

That way disaster lies.  There is ill luck in the selection.  Even Chantecler would fail to draw the public if put on a Fleet Street publication.  There is a fatality about feathers.  It has happened so, perhaps, since journalists abandoned the goose-quill for the Gillott, the pencil, and the stylus.  But that it is so there can be no manner of doubt.  The smartest, breeziest, and best-written little paper of which I have any recollection was The Owl.  It appeared only during the Parliamentary session.  It was a sort of co-operative concern carried on by a group of able men in politics and Society.  It came somewhat before my time, and I am shaky in my recollections of its short but brilliant career.  I think Bowles fleshed his maiden sword in its columns, and Hume Williams the Elder wrote in it his “Diary of a Disappointed Politician.”  The other members of the group were persons of higher social distinction.  The profits of the issue were expended on dinners at Greenwich—I wonder why people ever did dine at Greenwich?—and on a box at the opera.  But the paper did not live, and now “The Owl, for all his feathers, is a’ cold.”

“If we don’t dry up we’ll be smashed tip,” he replied.  “Look at this!  He insists on its going in!”

“He,” of course, was Davis, and “it” was a paragraph dealing with the private life of a very great lady indeed.  This particular item got crushed out at the last minute.  But the risks of criminal libel run every day by “Jimmy” would appal the modern journalist.  This notwithstanding, the Cuckoo died a natural death.  Contrary to general expectation, it “dried up,” and was not “smashed up.”

The bat is not what naturalists would call a bird, but I feel sure Davis thought it was.  For his second venture was a weekly publication called The Bat.  In his earlier paper he had gone out of his way to attack Society people; in the Bat he found a savage delight in crucifying Stage folk.  In this direction he probably went as far as any man ever did go without suffering from reprisals.  He was less fortunate when he turned his attention to the leading men on the Turf.  Lord Durham, being advised that the Bat had gone beyond the limits of fair criticism, took criminal proceedings.  The redoubtable James, having a lawyer’s notion of what the upshot would be, and a nice appreciation of the advantages of liberty, repaired to France, where he remained in exile for several years.  George Lewis, indeed, boasted that as long as he (Lewis) lived Jimmy should never return to his native land.  And when two Jews feel like that about each other, you may safely anticipate trouble.  But Mrs. Davis brought her personal influence to bear on Lord Durham, and, the Hatton Garden threat notwithstanding, “Jimmy,” who had got as far as Boulogne, was permitted to return to London—absent from which centre of activity he was never really happy.

Another bird of ill omen was The Hawk.  This was hatched out by Augustus Moore, an Irishman very well known in the eighties on the Press, but in later years better known in connection with the stage and stage plays.  Augustus Moore was the brother of George of that ilk, an author who first came into notice by means of a collection of verses, chiefly imitations of Swinburne, and called “Pagan Poems,” and afterwards notorious for some faithful studies of domestic servants given to the public in the guise of fiction of the Zolaesque order of literature.  In his labours on the Hawk, Augustus Moore was greatly assisted by his compatriot and copartner, Mr. J. M. Glover, known in later days as the conductor at Drury Lane and onetime Mayor of Bexhill-on-Sea.

The Pelican may, at first sight, appear to be an exception to the rule which associates ill luck with the selection of a bird name for a paper.  But, with all respect to Mr. Boyd, the Pelican is scarcely a paper in any large or liberal use of that term.  It is a little organ owned, edited, and principally written, by one man.  It has discovered a nice adjustment between the minimum of “copy” and the maximum of advertisement.  But the circulation is good, and the advertisers are quite satisfied, so no one else need cavil; however, I should not advise any future promoter to attempt success on Mr. Boyd’s lines, even with a good bird name to start out on.

Another bird which, having for many years suffered severely from the pip, at length died a lingering death, not greatly regretted by the public for which it fatuously “clucked,” was The Bird o’ Freedom.  This weird fowl was hatched in the hot incubators of the Sporting Times.  Its memorial tablet is now affixed, together with that of the Man of the World, among the titles of the parent paper.  No paper has so many titles incorporated as the Pink Un.

“How much money should you have to start a daily newspaper?” I once asked the owner of one of our great dailies.

“Two hundred and fifty thousand pounds,” he answered promptly.

A much shorter shrift was accorded by the public—that difficile and insensate public!—to The Hour.  This ambitious Tory organ was edited by Captain Hamber, who had held a corresponding post on the Standard.  Hamber was one of the most remarkable men I ever met.  He possessed some rather pronounced eccentricities; but he was a gentleman ad unguem, and he had the authentic editorial flair.  But the faith of the proprietors of the Hour could not have been equal to the proverbial grain of mustard-seed.  For—at least, so Hamber more than once told me—they “shut down” on the very day on which, for the first time, the paper showed a profit.  On the collapse of this Conservative venture the gallant Captain was offered the editorship of the Morning Advertiser.  Thus he could—and did—boast of having controlled the destinies of three morning papers.  He did not, however, very greatly relish his connection with the “’Tiser,” as it was irreverently called by the Street.  But he did his work well and conscientiously, and succeeded in what should have seemed an impossible task—that, namely, of raising the tone and increasing the influence and circulation of the organ of the British Bung.

His handwriting was the very worst I ever attempted to make out.  As a matter of fact, he could not decipher it himself.  But there was one compositor in each of the offices in which he had edited who could set up his copy, though, as Hamber often said, “whether he really sets up exactly what I wrote is quite another matter.  But he always swears he does, and I’m blessed if I can contradict him!”  Before Captain Hamber took to journalism he had become known as having been the man who enrolled and commanded the German Legion during the Crimean War.  Neither Hamber nor his Legion was ever called to the front; but it was generally admitted that in this matter he had acted promptly and patriotically.  Hamber was a staunch party man, a member of the Junior Carlton Club from its foundation, and he possessed an unrivalled acquaintance with the fine art of party tactics.  It is not altogether to the credit of the party that his last days should have been passed under a cloud to which there was no silver lining.  He was a man physically of great proportions, but had acquired a stooping habit and unmilitary gait.  And his great frame contained a heart as big as the shell that enshrined it.

H. J. Byron brought out a penny rival to Punch, to which he gave the somewhat jejune title Comic News.  But there was nothing at all jejune about the contents.  The editor seemed to have inspired his staff with his own spirit of wild and irresponsible fun.  The thing was a roar from beginning to end.  The title displayed a caricature of the royal arms, with the mottoes “Dieu et mon droit” and “Honi soit qui mal y pense” riotously rendered, “Do ’em and drwaw it” and “On his walks he madly puns.”  It was the funniest thing ever produced, but it did not take with the many-headed.  I strongly suspect that the public imagined that “H. J.” was laughing at and not with them.

How the St. Stephen’s Review managed to struggle through its recurring financial viscissitudes is one of the unsolved mysteries of the publishing world.  It was a strong Tory weekly, price sixpence, with a coloured cartoon by Tom Merry, and the one outstanding fact to its credit is that Mr. William Alison, the editor, gave Phil May his first chance.  Alison has since those days discovered his journalistic métier in a field far removed from the arid area of politics, and in his new line he has achieved a large and financial success.  I wrote a lot of copy for the St. Stephen’s Review.  But I turned it up after a while, and I have no doubt someone better qualified took my place.

A curious incident happened to me in connection with this paper.  The Hon. Mrs. Whyte-Melville, widow of the novelist, had engaged as her private chaplain a wild Irish divine known as the Rev. Peter Higginson.  Peter had been chaplain to Bishop Colenso, and his native impetuosity had been increased on the African veldt.  Now, a paragraph had appeared in Alison’s paper in which it was stated, as a matter of gossip, that Whyte-Melville’s favourite cob, which had been provided an old age of ease by the deceased gentleman’s will, was being daily galloped about the Thames Valley by a mad clergyman with a big red beard.  A day or two after the appearance of the paragraph a gentleman answering the description of the person mentioned in connection with Whyte-Melville’s cob, entered my room unannounced.  He threw a copy of the paper containing the note on the table at which I was sitting.

“That manes me, an’ you wrote it!” he said.

I asked him to be so good as to remove his hat and take a seat.  He complied growling, and blushing, I thought, on his cheek-bones.

“Now, perhaps,” I suggested suavely, “you will tell me who you are and how you got in here.”

“I’m the Rivirind Pether Higginson,” he answered, in a more chastened spirit, “an’ I gev your boy five shilluns to let me in.”

“You’ve got five shillings belonging to this gentleman.  Give them back to him.”  Greatly resenting the order, the boy complied.  “Now show the gentleman out!” I continued.

A letter from Peter received a month after assured me that he had discovered the writer of the offensive note, that he greatly regretted his intrusion, and that he would esteem it as a great favour if I would lunch with him on the following day at Simpson’s in the Strand.  I went, and had a most amusing time listening to his gasconading.  He married the widow for the repose of whose husband’s soul he had been engaged to pray, and I became an occasional visitor at their house at St. Margaret’s-on-Thames.  Peter’s solicitude for my welfare was quaintly evinced on the first occasion of my dining with the newly-married couple.  Just before going into the dining-room he whispered solemnly in my ear:

“Don’t dhrink the clar’t: it’s muck!”

“If I be waspish best beware!” was the motto which appeared under the title of The Hornet.  This smart and satirical little paper was originally launched in the wilds of Hornsey as a minor City organ.  It then came into the hands of the American, Stephen Fiske.  This gentleman made theatrical criticism the leading feature of his newly-acquired property.  He was a great friend of Mrs. John Wood, the inimitable comedienne, and he was said to have been financed by Peabody the philanthropist.  This I always took leave to doubt, because, although Fiske put plenty of brains and labour into his new purchase, it gave none of the customary signs of any considerable outlay of money.  Indeed, in his hands, the Hornet was more or less (rather more than less) of a financial failure.  Fiske returned to New York.  Here he took up the post of dramatic critic on the Spirit of the Times, a position which he still holds, though the name of the journal has been changed to Sports of the Times.

Under the editorship of Vero Shaw the Hornet exhibited all the signs of enlightened management and a desire to live up to the paper’s motto.  Shaw introduced new men and new features.  H. J. Byron was engaged to write a serial, and he also contributed a weekly causerie entitled “Our Absurd Column.”  Other members of the staff were Godfrey Turner, John Augustus O’Shea, Tom Purnell, and the redoubtable Featherstonhaugh.  For the first time in its varied career the paper began to hum, a circumstance attributable not only to the increased brightness of the literary department, but also to the fact that the cartoons were the work of that most gifted of caricaturists and most amiable of men, the late Alfred Bryan.  One salient feature of the paper under its new control was a spicy City article in which the bucket-shops of the period were remorselessly exposed and condemned.  A syndicate of City men then came forward and offered a price so substantial that the proprietor could not resist the temptation to realize.  Having gained their object by purchase, the Hornet was put to a speedy and painless end by its new owners.

James Mortimer made a long, arduous, and plucky fight of it with Figaro.  First of all the paper appeared as a daily, and was supposed to enjoy some financial backing from the Tuileries.  Eventually it settled down into a weekly.  For a short period, too, it sent out a Sunday edition.  But Mortimer was not one of the lucky ones.  After the disappearance of Figaro from the face of the earth, he started the Lantern, and in still more recent years the Anglo-Saxon.  His later bantlings all perished in early life owing to feeble circulation and insufficient nourishment.  It is, however, with his first venture, Figaro, that the name of James Mortimer will always remain honourably associated.  His staff on that paper was largely recruited from the Civil Service.  He engaged Clement Scott, of the War Office; Dowty (“ O. P. Q. Philander Smiff”), of the Paymaster’s Office; Ernest Bendall, of the same Department; Archer and Winterbotham.  They were not only capable writers—Mortimer was wont to say—but they were reliable.  “You always know where to find them when you want them,” he would slyly add.  Mortimer’s hobby had always been chess, and to the pursuit of this stimulating science he devoted a considerable portion of a full and busy life.

. . . But I have exceeded the chapter limit which I had assigned to myself, and I have dealt with but a few of the dear—the very dear—departed papers of my day. . . .  The sheeted dead press round me, gibbering and clamouring for notice.  Poor ineffectual ghosts!  They are doomed still to “walk.”  I have no space in which to “lay” them.

Nearly opposite the old Gaiety Theatre in the Strand stood the offices of Gaze and Co., the tourists’ agents.  And in the early seventies the upper part of the premises had been let to a retired old sea-dog of portly person and convivial habits called Captain Harris.  This gentleman had made a somewhat extensive acquaintance among the lesser lights of the stage, the music-hall, and the newspaper world, and he had taken the upper part of the Gaze office with the view of turning it into a Bohemian club.

For a while the institution flourished greatly.  It was named the Savoy Club—on the lucus a non lucendo principle—and by those who had not been chosen for membership it was nicknamed “the Saveloy.”  A continuous conviviality was the dominant note of the establishment.  The hours kept by the members were astounding.  The pace, in a word, was too fast.  And in a couple of years the Savoy closed its doors, the unfortunate mariner who founded it having lost in the venture the savings of a lifetime.

It is true that after a successful managerial career lasting over many years his luck deserted him, and his theatre fell into other hands, but the period of undimmed success during which he kept burning that which he called “the sacred lamp of burlesque” was one upon which he might look back with considerable satisfaction.  He was in many directions a reformer.  He abolished the programme fee.  He refused to sublet his cloak-rooms to the harpies who at that time held an undisputed monopoly for at once incommoding and fleecing the playgoers who booked for the stalls and boxes.  He was the first man in London who installed the electric light.  He did not, indeed, use it as an illuminant inside his theatre—electric lighting was in its infancy, and had not as yet been tried as an indoor illuminant—but he burned a fierce, if blinking, electric globe over the main entrance to the Gaiety, and he should have the obituary honours due to the pioneer.

No figure was more familiar in the Strand, Garrick Street, and the West End than that of Hollingshead in the halcyon days of the Gaiety.  His good looks, his neat attire, his silvery hair, his hat cocked a trifle on one side, his brisk walk, his cheery expression, and his generally debonair appearance, suggested even to the outsider the busy, competent, yet good-natured, man of affairs.  He was an excellent talker, very fond of paradox.  A utilitarian philosopher, he was a follower of Jeremy Bentham.  It was difficult to gather from his views as given in conversation what his political convictions really were.  I once asked him the question.  He readily replied in that curious but modulated falsetto of his.  “I’m a Tory Socialist,” was his answer.

The swagger stallites who had organized themselves into a beauty cult at the Gaiety displayed every variety of what Tennyson called “the gilded forehead of the fool.”  These young gentlemen were known as “mashers” (the object of their temporary devotions was known as a “mash”); as “Johnnies” and as “members of the Crutch and Toothpick Brigade.”  In this race for the overrated favours of the chorus lady they were often beaten by the elderly “masher”—the fatuous old roué of the wig, the stays, the pigments, and the unguents.  In these, as in all other civil contracts, it is money that matters, after all.

If Hollingshead played burlesque as his trump card, it must be recalled, in justice to his memory, that he instituted the matinée in London; and that he instituted it, not as the vehicle for amateur authors who played with problems, and called the result “problem plays,” but as the means of introducing to the London public (or re-introducing) the greatest living exponents of the highest examples of dramatic literature.  He brought over from Paris the entire company of the House of Molière.  He engaged Charles Mathews to play in a series of his memorable and delightful performances.  And if I don’t mistake, he gave that veteran actor the opportunity of enacting a new part in a new-play, “My Awful Dad.”  He afforded us the opportunity of seeing Phelps in his rendering of Sir Pertinax MacSycophant in Macklin’s “Man of the World,” probably the finest all-round bit of acting I have even been privileged to witness.

Nellie Farren was the wife of Robert Soutar, the stage-manager of the Gaiety, a comic actor of limited range, and the author of some popular farces.  An extremely convivial soul when off the stage, he was regarded as a martinet while on it, and during the entire period of his stage-management hardly a day passed without a rehearsal being called on some pretence or another.  For this reason he was highly disapproved of by the chorus, toward the members of which his sentiments were sometimes conveyed with brutal directness.  “It’s the only sort of language they understand,” he once said to me.  Perhaps he was right, although the polished shafts of Byron’s irony often went home quite as surely.  I have known a girl at rehearsal burst into tears under the suavely-spoken sarcasm of Byron, and I once received a letter of complaint from a member of a chorus illustrating one of his burlesques, in which the talented author of “Our Boys” was described as “a nasty, sneerin’ beest.”

If anyone were to ask me who, in my experience, was the most mirth-provoking actor I had ever seen, I should, without the least hesitation, mention a name which is quite unknown to the playgoers of this generation, and is being rapidly forgotten by those who belong to the last.  And the name that I should mention would be that of John Sleeper Clarke.  The house at which he originally appeared was the little Strand Theatre, merrily associated with the burlesques of the Broughs and Byron, and subsequently with the less artless productions of H. B. Farnie, in which so much laughter was made for the public by Marius and Edward Terry, and that plump, inimitable Angelina Claude.  J. S. Clarke was an American, and, although he appeared with great success in some of our dramatic masterpieces—he was the finest Bob Acres and the best Dr. Pangloss of his day—he preferred to enact characters written for him in pieces of which he held the copyright.

There must be many men about town who retain a vivid recollection of Clarke’s acting.  They will bear me out as to the statement just made.  They will remember how their sides shook as Clarke in “De Boots” made the entirely empty declaration: “My dear Felix, I call you Felix because you are my best friend!”  What an extraordinary quality of irresistible humour he imparted to that absurdly puerile line!  Again, what a weight and world of dramatic humour he imposed on the trifling sentence addressed to the pump in “Toodles”!  The scene is one in which he depicts a man imperfectly sober.  Stumbling about a yard, he knocks against the pump.  He grasps the handle, snakes it heartily up and down, exclaiming the while, “Excuse me, my friend—er—will you take anything?” Banal to a degree, I quite admit.  But Lord! how often have I roared over the words, and to how many of my own day who read this page do they not recall an ineffaceable and delightful recollection—an they would but acknowledge it.

Reticence is not usually the characteristic note of the actor.  Of all the companionships that I formed during my Press experiences, none were so enjoyable as those I made on the stage.  There are, of course, some pompous asses among them.  But you will find these in all callings.  And the pompous mummer was never the most successful one.  As a rule, the more distinguished and gifted the actor, the more genial and accessible he is.  The players are full of amusing early experiences, which they relate with delightful candour.  Actors’ stories are, as a rule, well told, and are worth telling.  Nor is this extraordinary.  Making points off the stage should be very good practice for making points on it.  There were two classes of raconteur in my day.  The one was the reminiscent or quasi-historical man; the other was the simple retailer of good stories.  Of the former class the two finest examples were John Ryder and John Coleman.  Of the latter were Lionel Brough and Arthur Williams.  I should not have used the past tense in alluding to Arthur Williams, who, I am happy to know, is alive and well, and still entertaining a public in whose smiles he has basked for many years.

But to get back to “Lal” and his stories.  The majority of these were, I have every reason to believe, “made up” by Brough.  Everything was in the telling.  One of them occurs to me now.  A certain young married couple had been rendered very unhappy by the betting habits of the husband.  They had an only boy of some seven summers.  They were in debt all over the place.  The servant had been discharged.  There was little food in the house.  At this tragic juncture a cheque for forty pounds arrived.  The relieved and delighted husband embraced his wife and hurried off to the city to “melt” the cheque, promising to return immediately, settle all outstanding accounts, and take the family out to dinner.  There was racing at Kempton that day, and the unfortunate man knew of one or two “certs.”  So when he had received the proceeds of the cheque, he ran down to Kempton Park, fired with the benevolent idea of doubling, or even quadrupling, his forty pounds.  The usual thing happened.  Far from winning, he dropped every sou, and returned home a sad, despairing man.  He hoped for sympathy from his wife; but, for the first time in their married existence, the wife rose to the occasion, and, in unmistakable terms, denounced her stricken and shamefaced spouse.  He slunk from the room, and silently closed the door behind him.  She heard him mount the stairs.  But her heart was hardened against him.  Ten minutes after the exit of the gambler her little golden-haired blue-eyed boy dashed into the room.