rs
on this earth were to be short. He was not the gayer for it as Harland
and Beardsley were, but the sadder, it may be because he foresaw the
end long before it came, and he was given to the melancholy that found
expression in so many of his paintings.

Wilson Steer, Tonks, Professor Brown passed, and no more, across the
stage of our Thursday nights, all three, as I remember them, scrupulous
in upholding the reputation for silence of their Club. Conder flitted in
and out of our rooms, always agreeable but not the man to lift up his
voice in a crowd.

Occasionally, a visitor from abroad appeared--Felix Buhot every Thursday
that one winter, or, more rarely Paul Renouard, in London for the
_Graphic_, his appearance an event for the illustrators who already
reverenced him as a veteran. Or else it was a representative, a
publisher, of _les Jeunes_ over there, bringing fresh stimulus, fresh
incentive, especially if his coming meant fresh orders and fresh
opportunity to say what had to be said freely and without restraint.
Once it was Jules Roque from Paris, of the _Courrier Francais_ in which
he published the drawings of Louis Legrand and Forain and other artists
accepted as models by the young men of our Thursday nights who believed
in themselves the more defiantly when asked to figure in such good
company. Once it was Meier Graefe from Berlin, big, handsome,
enterprising, not yet encumbered with Post-Impressionism and its
outshoots, seeking American and British contributors to the German
_Pan_, a magazine as big and enterprising as himself if not always as
handsome, and the younger generation of London had the comfort of
knowing that if the Victorian door in England held firm, the door of
Europe had opened to them.

Occasionally one of the older, the very much older generation came in to
make us feel the younger for his presence--none more imposing than
Sandys, most distinguished in his old age, wearing the white waistcoat
that was the life-long symbol of his dandyism, full of Pre-Raphaelite
reminiscences, and reminiscences of the Italian Primitives could not
have seemed more remote. J. sometimes met Holman Hunt in other
haunts--at dinners of the Society of Illustrators and elsewhere--and
reported him to me as a talker who could, in the quantity and
aggressiveness of his talk, have given points to Henley and Henley's
Young Men, so I regret that he never was with us to talk over
Pre-Raphaelite days with Sandys. The only