him some time afterward to Lord Houghton, and he said: "There's a
very good reason for it. When Bulwer Lytton and Disraeli entered the
London world, Mr. Bevan was one of their earliest friends. He privately
helped Disraeli in social and other ways. To him Bulwer Lytton owed his
first personal knowledge of the then world of the dandies; and Mr.
Bevan," said Lord Houghton, "was the actual model from which, by both
these writers, their pictures of the typical man of the world were
drawn."

My acquaintance with Mr. Bevan, however, and even that with Lord
Houghton, were but minor experiences as compared with another meeting of
a similar yet contrasted kind. At the time of which I speak there was
one British author whose influence as a philosophic moralist eclipsed
that of any of his contemporaries. This writer was Carlyle. His fame
was then at its highest, and the moral consciousness of ultrapolite
drawing rooms was being stirred to its well-dressed depths by his attack
on "the dandies" in his book, _Sartor Resartus_, which many earnest and
ornamental persons were accepting as a new revelation. I was myself
sufficiently familiar with its pages, and, though some of them roused my
antagonism, I could not deny their genius. One morning, during a brief
visit to London, I received a note from Mr. Froude the historian, asking
me to come to luncheon, and I duly arrived at his house, not knowing
what awaited me. I presently learned that he was going to introduce me
to Carlyle, and, as soon as luncheon was over, he walked me off to
Chelsea. In a fitting state of awe I found myself at last in the great
philosopher's presence. When we entered his drawing room he was stooping
over a writing table in the window, and at first I saw nothing but his
back, which was covered with a long, shapeless, and extravagantly dirty
dressing gown. When he rose to meet us his manners were as rough as his
integument. His welcome to myself was an inarticulate grunt,
unmistakably Scotch in its intonation; and his first act was to move
across the room to the fireplace and light a "churchwarden" pipe by
sticking its head between the bars. As I watched him perform this rite,
I noticed that close to the fender was a pair of very dirty slippers. To
me these things and proceedings were so many separate shocks, the
result of my reflections being this: If you represent fame, let me
represent obscurity. But worse was still to come. It was presently
proposed that we