d a certain boisterous exaggeration of manner
which sometimes made his friends laugh at him. So far as I know, he
neither had nor deserved an enemy through all his effusive, genial, and
blameless life.

He burst into the Savage Club one day when I happened to be there alone.
He was unusually radiant and assured, and 'At last, at last,' he said,
'I've got my foot on the neck of this big London!' The triumphant phrase
set me thinking at the moment, and has often recalled to me since, the
time when this big London had its foot on me: a thing of the two which
I am afraid is the much more likely to happen in the experience of any
young aspirant to literary honours when he has neither friends nor money
to back him, and no reputation to begin with.

I came to London just after the opening of the Parliamentary session of
1872, at a time when every nook and corner of the journalistic work-room
was filled, and when the doors were besieged, as they always are at such
a season, by scores of outsiders eager for a turn at the good things
going. I forget now precisely how it came about, but I went to live at
a frowsy caravanserai in Bouverie Street, an astonishingly dirty and
disreputable hotel called the 'Sussex.' It is down now, and its site is
occupied by the extended offices of the _Daily News_; but in its day it
was the home of as much shabby gentility as could be found under any one
roof in London. Beds were to be had there at threepence and sixpence.
I remember no arrangement for meals, and certainly never troubled the
establishment in that way myself. The linen had a look of having been
washed in pea-soup and dried in a chimney, and the whole aspect of
the house and its _clientele_ was wo-begone and neglected to the last
extreme. Paper and pen and ink are cheap enough, and I used to sit all
day long in my bedroom, fireless in the winter weather, wrapped up in an
ulster and with a counterpane about my knees, writing for bare life.
I wrote verses grave and gay, special articles, leading articles, and
leaderettes. These were delivered at all manner of likely and unlikely
places, and came back again, like the curses and the chickens and the
bad penny in the proverbs.

I lived for weeks on hard-rinded rolls and thick chocolate, procured at
an Italian restaurant on the opposite side of Fleet Street, and found
myself admirably healthy on that simple diet. I wrote now and then to
friends in the country, disguising my estate, and tel