suggested the
idea of the young ladies slipping along the banisters and peeping into
the hall!

But I had other friends, more helpful to me in preparing my first
twin-offering to the Muses; the faces under the gas, the painted women
on the bridge (how many a night have I walked up and down by their
sides, and talked to them for hours together), the actors in the
theatres, the ragged groups at the stage doors. London to me, then, was
still Fairyland! Even in the Haymarket, with its babbles of nymph and
satyr, there was wonderful life from midnight to dawn--deep sympathy
with which told me that I was a born Pagan, and could never be really
comfortable in any modern Temple of the Proprieties. On other points
connected with that old life on the borders of Bohemia, I need not
touch; it has all been so well done already by Murger, in the 'Vie de
Boheme,' and it will not bear translation into contemporary English.
There were cakes and ale, pipes and beer, and ginger was hot in the
mouth too! _Et ego fui in Bohemia!_ There were inky fellows and bouncing
girls, _then; now_ there are only fine ladies, and respectable,
God-fearing men of letters.

It was while the twins were fashioning, that I went down in summer time
to live at Chertsey on the Thames, chiefly in order to be near to one I
had long admired, Thomas Love Peacock, the friend of Shelley and the
author of 'Headlong Hall'--'Greekey Peekey,' as they called him, on
account of his prodigious knowledge of things and books Hellenic. I soon
grew to love the dear old man, and sat at his feet, like an obedient
pupil, in his green old-fashioned garden at Lower Halliford. To him I
first read some of my 'Undertones,' getting many a rap over the
knuckles for my sacrilegious tampering with Divine Myths. What mercy
could _I_ expect from one who had never forgiven 'Johnny' Keats for his
frightful perversion of the sacred mystery of Endymion and Selene? and
who was horrified at the base 'modernism' of Shelley's 'Prometheus
Unbound?' But to think of it! He had known Shelley, and all the rest of
the demigods, and his speech was golden with memories of them all! Dear
old Pagan, wonderful in his death as in his life. When, shortly before
he died, his house caught fire, and the mild curate of the parish begged
him to withdraw from the library of books he loved so well, he flatly
refused to listen, and cried roundly, in a line of vehement blank verse,
'By the immortal gods, I will not stir!