his looks nor his silence, however original and personal, could
have been the cause of the charm he undeniably possessed. I think he was
one of the people whom one feels are nice instinctively, without any
reason. He was sympathetic and responsive, serious when the occasion
called for it, foolish when folly was in order. It wasn't only in his
drawings that he was ready to wear the cap and bells. I know an artist,
one of whose cherished memories of Phil May is of the Christmas Eve when
they both rang Lord Leighton's door-bell and ran away and back to Phil
May's studio on the other side of the road, and Phil May was as pleased
as if it had been a masterpiece for _Punch_. He was naturally
kind,--amiable perhaps because it was the simplest thing to be. In his
own house his amiability forced him to break his silence, but his
remarks then, as far as I heard them, were usually confined to the
monotonous offer "Have a cigar!" "Have a whiskey-and-soda!" or "Have a
drawing!" if anyone happened to express admiration for his work. Had we
accepted this last offer every time it was made to us, we would have a
fine collection of Phil May's, while, as it is, we do not own as much
as a single sketch given to us by him. Visitors who did not share our
scruples have found their steady attendance at his Sunday nights one of
the best investments they ever made.

Away from his own house, on our Thursday nights, relieved of the
necessity to offer anything, this being now our business, his
conversation was more limited than in his own place. My memory of him is
of an ugly, delightful, smiling, silent man, sitting astride a chair,
his arms resting on the back, a big cigar in his mouth, and around him a
band of devoted admirers as fully prepared and equipped to do the
talking for him as he was to let them do it. He held his court as
royally among illustrators as Henley among his Young Men, and if nobody
contributed so little to the talk as Phil May, around nobody else,
except Henley, did so much of the talk centre.

In my recollections of Phil May astride his chair on Thursday nights,
Hartrick and Sullivan are never very long absent. Nobody knew better
than they the beauty of his work--to hear them talk about his line was
to be convinced that the supreme interest in life was the expressive
quality of a line made with pen in black ink on a piece of white paper.
The appearance of _The_ _Parson and the Painter_ was one of the events
of the Ninetie