the dear old governor's allowance at all." He wrote an ardent
letter, full of happiness and affection, to the kind father, which
he shall find a month after he has arrived in India, and read to his
friends in Calcutta and Barrackpore. Clive invited many of his artist
friends to a grand feast in honour of the thirty shillings. The King's
Arms, Kensington, was the hotel selected (tavern beloved of artists for
many score years!). Gandish was there, and the Gandishites, and some
chosen spirits from the Life Academy, Clipstone Street, and J. J. was
vice-president, with Fred Bayham by his side, to make the speeches and
carve the mutton; and I promise you many a merry song was sung, and many
a health drunk in flowing bumpers; and as jolly a party was assembled as
any London contained that day. The beau-monde had quitted it; the Park
was empty as we crossed it; and the leaves of Kensington Gardens had
begun to fall, dying after the fatigues of a London season. We sang all
the way home through Knightsbridge and by the Park railings, and the
Covent Garden carters halting at the Half-way House were astonished
at our choruses. There is no half-way house now; no merry chorus at
midnight.

Then Clive and J. J. took the steamboat to Antwerp; and those who love
pictures may imagine how the two young men rejoiced in one of the most
picturesque cities of the world; where they went back straightway into
the sixteenth century; where the inn at which they stayed (delightful
old Grand Laboureur, thine ancient walls are levelled! thy comfortable
hospitalities exist no more!) seemed such a hostelry as that where
Quentin Durward first saw his sweetheart; where knights of Velasquez
or burgomasters of Rubens seemed to look from the windows of the
tall-gabled houses and the quaint porches; where the Bourse still stood,
the Bourse of three hundred years ago, and you had but to supply figures
with beards and ruffs, and rapiers and trunk-hose, to make the picture
complete; where to be awakened by the carillon of the bells was to waken
to the most delightful sense of life and happiness; where nuns, actual
nuns, walked the streets, and every figure in the Place de Meir, and
every devotee at church, kneeling and draped in black, or entering the
confessional (actually the confessional!), was a delightful subject for
the new sketchbook. Had Clive drawn as much everywhere as at Antwerp,
Messrs. Soap and Isaac might have made a little income by supplying him