other possible representative
of Pre-Raphaelitism who came was Walter Crane, if so he can be called,
for the tradition fell lightly on his shoulders, was a mere re-echo in
his work; the only one of Sandys's contemporaries was Whistler, and
their meeting of which J. and I have written in another place, does not
belong to the story of our Thursday nights, for they were a thing of the
past when Whistler returned from Paris, where he had gone to live almost
as they began.

Nor did Sandys often appear on Thursdays. He seemed to prefer the
evenings when we were alone, to my surprise, for the homage he received
when he did come on Thursday must have been pleasant. Drawings of his
hung prominently in our rooms, J. then haunting the salesrooms for the
originals of the Sixties as industriously as the barrows and shops for
their reproductions. And to the man who prefers fame to reach him during
his lifetime, surely it should have been an agreeable experience to sit,
or to be enthroned as it were, in so friendly an atmosphere, with some
of his own finest work on the wall behind him for background, and
surrounded by a worshipping group asking nothing better than to be
allowed to sit at his feet and listen to his every word--which was a
sacrifice for his worshippers in Buckingham Street who rejoiced in the
sound of their own voices as did most of the company. But the Nineties
are not more wonderful and stimulating to the young men of to-day who
look back to them so admiringly, than the Sixties were to us whom they
kept up into the small hours of many a Friday morning, inexhaustible as
a subject of our talk, and Sandys, standing for the Sixties and all we
found in them so admirable, could command any sacrifice. The respect for
the Sixties was an article of faith, a dogma of dogmas in the Nineties.
If the now younger generation write articles and books about the
Nineties--those amazing documents in which I scarcely recognise an age I
thought I knew by heart--we were still more zealous in writing books
about the Sixties. And we collected the drawings and publications of the
Sixties. When J. and I now allowed ourselves an afternoon out, it was to
wander from Holywell Street to Mile End Road, from Piccadilly to
Holborn, searching the booksellers' barrows and shops for the unsightly,
gaudy, badly-bound volumes that contained the illustrations of the
Sixties--illustrations ranked amongst the finest ever made. Our
bookshelves that are still