emeral journals. I gave lectures and printed
them as pamphlets. It was all very good exercise; but the odd part of it
seems to me, in looking back, that I never expected pay, but rather
spent my own money in printing what I wrote. That last infirmity of
literary minds I laid aside soon after I left Oxford. I rather think
that the first money which I made with my pen was payment for a
character-study of my uncle, Lord Russell, which I wrote for _The
World_; thereby eliciting from Matthew Arnold the urbane remark, "Ah, my
dear George, I hear you have become one of Yates's hired stabbers."

After I entered Parliament, opportunities of writing, and of writing for
profit, became more frequent. I contributed to the _Quarterly_, the _New
Quarterly_, the _Nineteenth Century_, the _Fortnightly_, the
_Contemporary_, the _Spectator_, and the _Pall Mall_. Yet another
magazine recurs pleasantly to my mind, because of the warning which was
inscribed on one's proof-sheet--"The cost of _corrigenda_ will be
deducted from _honoraria_." What fine language! and what a base economy!

It did not take me long to find that the society in which I habitually
lived, and which I have described in a former chapter, was profoundly
ignorant. A most amusing law-suit between a Duchess and her maid took
place about the time of which I am writing, and the Duchess's
incriminated letter, beginning in the third person, wandering off into
the first, and returning with an effort to the third, was indeed an
object-lesson in English composition. A young sprig of fashion once said
to me, in the tone of a man who utters an accepted truth, "It is so
much more interesting to talk about people than things"--even though
those "things" were the literary triumphs of humour or tragedy. In one
great house, Books were a prohibited subject, and the word "Books" was
construed with such liberal latitude that it seemed to include
everything except Bradshaw. Even where people did not thus truculently
declare war against literature, they gave it an uncommonly wide berth,
and shrank with ill-concealed aversion from such names as Meredith and
Browning. "Meredith," said Oscar Wilde, "is a prose-Browning--and so is
Browning." And both those forms of prose were equally eschewed by
society.

Of course, when one is surveying a whole class, one sees some
conspicuous exceptions to the prevailing colour; and here and there one
had the pleasure of meeting in society persons admirably ac