Chapter 6 LIFE IN LONDON.

Appointed London Correspondent of the Leeds Mercury-My

Marriage-Securing Admission to the Reporters' Gallery-Relations between

Reporters and Members-Inadequate Accommodation for the

Press-Reminiscences of the Clerkenwell Explosion-The Last Public

Execution-The Arundel Club-James Macdonell-Robert Donald-James

Payn-Mrs. Riddell and the St. James's Magazine-My First

Novel-How Sala Cut Short an Anecdote-Disraeli as Leader of the House in

1868-A Personal Encounter with him at Aylesbury-Mr. Gladstone's First

Ministry-Bright and Forster-W. E. Baxter-Irish Church Disestablishment

Debate in the House of Lords-Mr. Mudford-Bereavement.

In 1867 a change unexpectedly took place in my position. The London representative of the Leeds Mercury, my old friend Mr. Charles Russell, now editor of the Glasgow Herald, retired from his post, and I was appointed to succeed him. In addition to the duties which had been discharged by Mr. Russell, it was arranged that I was to act as London correspondent of the Mercury and to continue to be an occasional contributor of leaders. On September 5th in this year I was married at Cheadle Congregational Church, Cheshire, to my cousin, to whom I had long been engaged, and I at once went to London to spend my honeymoon in the delightful occupation of house-hunting. The London suburbs wore a different aspect in 1867 from that which they now present. In the far west of London, at all events, the reign of the semi-detached villa, with its private garden, was still maintained. There were no lofty "mansions" comprising endless suites for the accommodation of persons of limited means, and the system of a common garden for the residents in a particular street or square was practically unknown outside the central district of the metropolis. Notting Hill, Kensington, Shepherd's Bush, and Hammersmith offered to the man of moderate means the choice among an infinite number of pleasant little villas, each boasting its own garden and lawn secluded from the public eye. My choice fell upon a house of this description in Addison Road North, and there I spent two happy years, the garden, with its fine old tree casting a welcome shade over the lawn, making me forget the fact that I was, at last, an actual dweller in the world's greatest city.

Almost my first business in London was to secure admission to the Reporters' Gallery in the House of Commons. There was an autumn session in that year, 1867, and I was anxious to get access to the Gallery when it began. In order to obtain the coveted Gallery ticket I proffered my gratuitous services as an occasional reporter to the Morning Star. My offer was accepted, and after an interview with Mr. Justin McCarthy, who was then editor of the Star, I was introduced to Mr. Edwards, the chief of the reporting staff, as a new member of that body. Edwards, who was one of the veterans of the Gallery, was a character in his way. He was an Irishman possessed of a delicious brogue, a devout Roman Catholic, intensely proud of the fact that he had a son in the priesthood. His mind was stored with reminiscences of the Gallery in the days when the status of a Parliamentary reporter was hardly recognised even in the House of Commons itself. Like so many of the Gallery men of this time, his world seemed to be limited to the little society of which he was a conspicuous member. Nothing appeared to interest him that lay outside the immediate duties of a Parliamentary reporter. His sole reading seemed to be the reports of debates, his sole pleasure listening to Parliamentary speeches. Many amusing stories were told of him by his colleagues. Not long before I made his acquaintance, Mr. Bright, in one of the debates on the Liberal Reform Bill, had made his famous reference to the Cave of Adullam which caused the anti-reformers in the Liberal party to be nicknamed "Adullamites." Mr. Bright was interested in the Morning Star, and that newspaper's report of this passage in his speech was obviously confused and defective. The day after it was printed the manager of the Star summoned Edwards to his presence in order to complain of this fact. "Do you think our fellows understood the allusion to the Cave of Adullam?" he inquired of Edwards. "Of course they did," replied the latter, hotly. "They're an ignorant lot, I know, but there isn't one of them so ignorant as not to have read the Arabian Nights!"

Edwards was very kind to me. He seemed to feel a profound respect for a man who undertook to do any work for nothing, and he did his utmost to make my somewhat anomalous position personally agreeable. One bit of good advice he gave me. That was that I should not let anyone know that I received no salary. The truth is that in those days the Parliamentary reporters were a very clannish set-almost, indeed, a close corporation. To my youthful eyes, most of them appeared to be men who had attained an almost incredible age. They could talk of the days in the old House of Commons when no Reporters' Gallery existed, and the unfortunate shorthand writers had to take their notes on their knees, at the back of the Strangers' Gallery. In the House of Lords they had to stand in a kind of gangway, and I have heard a venerable man tell how a certain distinguished peeress, who had to pass along this gangway when she went to hear the debates, used deliberately to brush against the reporters as she did so, and knock the note-books out of their hands. It was, I suppose, her Grace's manner of displaying her peculiar affection for the Press. The reporters looked with suspicion upon any newcomer, and for a time after I entered the Gallery I was viewed with unconcealed dislike by most of my new colleagues.

A somewhat untoward incident that happened on the first night on which I took my seat as one of the Star staff added to this feeling. Worthy Edward Baines, sitting on the Opposition benches below me, no sooner recognised me in the Gallery than he felt it to be his duty to come up and have a chat with me. Accordingly he made his way to one of the side galleries adjoining the reporters' seats, and conversed with me for several minutes, pointing out the leading members and officials of the House and making himself generally agreeable, as was his wont. I little knew what offence I was unconsciously giving to my colleagues. In those days a gulf that was regarded as impassable divided the members of the Press from the members of the House. Occasionally the white-haired, or rather white-wigged, Mr. Ross, the head of the Times Parliamentary corps, might be seen holding a mysterious colloquy in some gloomy corner behind the Gallery with some politician; but the overwhelming majority of the reporters had never exchanged a word with a Member of Parliament in their lives, and, to do them justice, they evidently had no desire to do so. The caste of reporters neither had, nor wished to have, any relations with the Brahmins of the green benches below them, and I found subsequently that if by any chance a reporter were detected in conversation with even the most obscure Member of Parliament he thought it necessary to give some explanation of his conduct to his Gallery friends afterwards. It may be imagined, then, with what feelings the veterans of the Gallery saw a newcomer, on his very first appearance in the Gallery, talking on friendly and confidential terms with a well-known Member of the House. Some of the old hands positively snorted at me in their indignation, and one of the few friends I had in the Gallery earnestly warned me that the recurrence of such an incident would prove fatal to my career as a Parliamentary reporter. Who would have imagined then that the relations of journalists and Members would ever assume their present intimate character?

The accommodation for reporters outside the Gallery was very different then from what it is now. There were two wretched little cabins, ill-lit and ill-ventilated, immediately behind the Gallery, which were used for "writing out." But one of these was occupied exclusively by the Times staff, and the other was so small that it could not accommodate a quarter of the number of reporters. One of the committee rooms on the upper corridor-No. 18, if I remember aright-was given up after a certain hour in the afternoon to the reporters, and here most of the work of "writing out" was done. As for other accommodation for the Press, it consisted only of a cellar-like apartment in the yard below, where men used to resort to smoke, and of the ante-room to the Gallery, where the majestic Mr. Wright presided.

Mr. Wright was one of the characters of the Gallery. Like most of the officials of the House in those days, he was a protégé of the Sergeant-at-Arms, Lord Charles Russell. Rumour declared that he had originally been a boat-builder on the Thames, and had secured the favour of Lord Charles by his services in teaching his sons to row. He certainly looked more like a boat-builder, or the captain of a barge, than the keeper of the vestibule to the Reporters' Gallery. He was permitted to purvey refreshments of a modest kind to the reporters. He always had a bottle of whisky on tap, a loaf or two of stale bread, and a most nauseous-looking ham. I never, during my career in the Gallery, tasted that ham. The tradition was that every night, when Mr. Wright, at the close of his duties, retired to his modest abode in Lambeth, he took with him the ham, wrapped in a large red bandana which he had been flourishing, and using, during the evening, and for greater security placed it under his bed during the night. I do not vouch for the truth of this story, universally believed by the Gallery men of my day.

I simply repeat that I never in the course of my life tasted one of Mr. Wright's hams. The sole refreshment I ever consumed in his filthy den consisted of eggs and tea. The tea I drank with unfeigned reluctance, but the eggs, however stale, inspired me with a confidence I felt in none of the other viands provided by the ex-boat-builder. The reporters nowadays have a dining-room of their own, as well as reading-room, smoking-room, and tea-room. The status of the Press is changed indeed.

One of Mr. Wright's characteristics was his love of talking Johnsonese. I can see him in my mind's eye now, as I emerged from the Gallery after a heavy "turn," reclining on the wooden bench which was his favourite place of rest. His head half covered with the famous red bandana; his boots off, and a pair of dirty worsted stockings exposed to view, he twiddled his thumbs, and through half-closed eyes cast a disparaging glance at the young member of the Gallery who had not yet patronised either his whisky or his ham; then, with a grunt, he would wake up and begin to speak. "I hope, sir, that you are intellectual enough to appreciate the grandeur of the debate to which you have just been privileged to listen. Sir, it fills me with an amazement that is simply inexpressible to listen to those two men, Gladstone and Disraeli, when they are a-conducting themselves as they 'ave been this evening. What I want to know, sir, is, where do they get it from? You and me could never do such a thing-no, not a moment. In my opinion they are more than mortal." But enough of Mr. Wright, who is dead now, though he lived to see the twentieth century born, and to mourn over the changed times which no longer made the hungry reporter dependent upon his famous ham.

The first night of that autumn session of 1867 was a memorable one. Mr. Disraeli sat on the Treasury Bench as leader of the House. Opposite to him sat Mr. Gladstone, now the recognised leader of the Liberal party. Mrs. Disraeli had been seriously ill; was, in fact, still ill when Parliament met. Mr. Gladstone, who never overlooked the courtesies of debate, in opening his attack upon the Government after the speech had been duly moved and seconded, made touching reference to the personal anxieties of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Mr. Disraeli was visibly moved. He suddenly covered his face with his hands, and one could see that his eyes were filled with tears. Nearly thirty years later there was a similar scene in the House, in which Mr. Gladstone was again the moving cause. This was when, referring to a speech by Mr. Austen Chamberlain, he spoke of it in terms that made Mr. Chamberlain himself flush with emotion, and caused the tears to gather in the eyes of that hardened political fighter. Strange are the links which bind the generations together!

It was in the late autumn of 1867 that one of the most remarkable of the outrages committed by the Fenians in London took place. This was the explosion at the Clerkenwell House of Detention. The object of the crime was the rescue of two Fenians who were confined in the prison. The authorities at Scotland Yard had got wind of the plot, and sought to put the governor of the prison, and the magistrates who controlled it, on their guard. The latter declared themselves quite able to look after their prisoners, and declined the proffered assistance of the police. Instead of keeping guard, as they should have done, round the walls of the House of Detention, they contented themselves with keeping the prisoners-whose names, if my memory does not fail, were Burke and Casey-in their cells at the hour when they usually took their daily exercise in the yard. A wheelbarrow, laden with powerful explosives, was deliberately wheeled up to the prison wall, outside the exercise ground, at the time when Burke and Casey were supposed to be walking there. An orange was thrown over into the yard, this being the signal that had been agreed upon with the captives, and the fuse attached to the barrel of explosives was lighted. Then the conspirators quietly retired, nobody molesting them. A terrific explosion followed.

I had just left the reading-room of the British Museum that afternoon, and was crossing the quadrangle, when I heard a sound which my experience of the Oaks Pit enabled me at once to recognise as that of an explosion. I thought that some kitchen boiler in an adjoining house must have burst; but nothing was to be seen, and I went my way, merely making a note, with the reporter's instinct, of the exact moment at which the explosion took place. The next morning the London papers were full of the details of the great crime. Several persons, including some children, had been killed outright, and many more had been injured. A breach had been made in the prison wall, but the Fenian prisoners, of course, had not escaped, owing to the precautions taken by the authorities. The whole country was roused to a violent state of indignation by this crime, which followed close upon a similar attempt to rescue other Fenian prisoners who were being carried in a prison van through the streets of Manchester. The Manchester crime resulted in the death of a police sergeant named Brett, and for that murder three men-Allen, Larkin, and Gould, who are still famous in Irish history as "the Manchester martyrs"-were hanged.

On the day following the Clerkenwell explosion I attended the inquest upon some of the victims, and, curiously enough, I was the only person who could inform the coroner of the exact hour at which the outrage was committed. The police were soon in hot pursuit of the culprits. Five men were arrested, and after a tedious investigation at Bow Street were committed for trial at the Old Bailey. If I remember aright, they were Irishmen hailing from Glasgow. I made my first acquaintance with Bow Street Police Court at the examination of these men. It was the old police court-a dismal, stuffy, ill-ventilated room-where justice had been administered for several generations. I have a lively recollection of the fact that whilst I was reporting the proceedings I suddenly fainted, for the first time in my life; and I still remember gratefully the kindness of the police, who removed me from the court room into the fresh air, and tended me with the utmost care until I had recovered. This sympathy with illness is one of the best characteristics of our London police.

The trial at the Old Bailey resulted in the acquittal of all the prisoners except one, a man named Barrett. He was convicted, and sentenced to death. Great interest in his case was felt in Glasgow, and I was asked by one of the Glasgow newspapers to telegraph to it a full account of the execution. It was in one respect to be a remarkable occasion, for an Act had just received the assent of Parliament putting an end to public executions, and Barrett's was to be the last event of the kind. I and an old newspaper friend named Donald, who was also commissioned to describe the scene, agreed to stay up all night in order that we might witness the gruesome preliminaries of a hanging at the Old Bailey. We were on duty in the Reporters' Gallery up to a late hour of the night, and I remember that Mr. Bright, rising from his seat below the gangway, made an appeal to the Home Secretary to spare the condemned man's life. It was very unusual for such an appeal to be made in that fashion, and it was still more unusual to make it within a few hours of the time fixed for the execution. The Home Secretary was, of course, unable to comply with Mr. Bright's prayer, but this scene in the House of Commons was undoubtedly a solemn one, more solemn and impressive than the tragedy to which it was the prelude. Donald and I, when the House at last rose, sauntered slowly through the streets, taking note of that night side of London, which was novel to both of us. In the early hours of the morning we found ourselves at Covent Garden, where we watched the unloading of the vegetable carts and the unpacking of the great hampers filled with sweet spring flowers. Before six o'clock we had reached the Old Bailey, where already a large crowd was gathering.

Rumours of an attempted rescue, even on the scaffold, had been freely circulated. Calcraft, the executioner, had received a number of threatening letters, which had frightened him greatly. The police, knowing what the Fenians had already attempted in the way of rescuing their friends, were very much on the alert, and more than a hundred officers, in private clothes and armed with revolvers, had been placed outside the barriers amongst the crowd. At six o'clock the great gates leading to the yard of the Old Bailey courthouse were thrown open, and with a heavy, rumbling sound the grim old scaffold which had figured in so many scenes of horror was for the last time drawn forth from its resting-place and wheeled to its position in front of the small, iron-barred door, which, as late as 1900, was still seen in the middle of the blank wall of Newgate Prison. The noise of the workmen's hammers as they made the scaffold fast was almost drowned by the roar of the quickly gathering crowd. All the scoundreldom of London seemed to have assembled for the occasion. It was the last Old Bailey execution crowd. The windows of the public-house opposite the scaffold had been thrown open, and at every window men and women were crowded together, eagerly waiting for the grim approaching spectacle. It was not an edifying sight, this execution crowd.

There was one strange incident connected with it that has never been put on record. Shortly after the scaffold had been placed in position I saw four men, whose faces were familiar to me, trying to force their way through the crowd, and I was greatly startled when I recognised them as the four men who had been tried at the same time as Barrett, but who had been acquitted by the jury. Not knowing what sinister purpose they might have in view, I felt it my duty at once to warn the chief inspector of police of their presence. He was greatly disturbed, and quickly pushed his way through the crowd towards the place I had indicated to him. I followed close at his heels until we reached the front of the scaffold. As we did so he quickly put his hand upon my shoulder to stop me, and at the same time uncovered his head. It was a strange sight that we saw in the middle of that obscene and blasphemous mob. The four men, who had so narrowly escaped the fate of Barrett, were kneeling, bare-headed, on the stones of the Old Bailey in front of the scaffold on which their friend was about to die, praying silently but earnestly. For several minutes they continued to kneel and pray, and then, suddenly rising, they hurriedly left the crowd and disappeared. "Did you ever see anything like that?" said the inspector to me; and I do not know which of us was the more moved by this strange incident.

Of the execution itself I have only one thing to say: that is, that Barrett died in a very different fashion from any other murderer whom I had seen hanged. He faced death, in fact, like a hero, with undaunted mien, and a smile upon his pallid lips. I observed that his trousers were all frayed and worn at the knees, and remarked upon the fact to one of the warders who was standing beside me. "Yes," he replied, "he has been on his knees, praying, ever since he was sentenced." I came away from the spot rejoicing in the thought that I should never again be called upon to witness that abominable thing a public execution.

It was in 1868 that I gained my first experience of London club-life. This was when I became a member of the Arundel Club. The club is still, I believe, in existence, and has a home somewhere in the Adelphi. In 1868 it occupied a house at the bottom of a street, running from the Strand to the river, which was swept away when the Hotel Cecil was built. This house had once been the residence of John Black, the well-known editor of the Morning Chronicle, a journalist who used to boast that his readers would follow him wherever he liked to lead them. The members of the club were, for the most part, journalists, actors, and artists. It was a delight to me to find admittance to the society I had hitherto regarded with wistful eyes from afar. I could feel at last that I had got a foothold, however humble, in the literary life of London. The man who introduced me to the club was my old friend James Macdonell. We had become intimate at Newcastle, in the days when he was editing the Northern Daily Express. His brilliant writing had attracted the attention of the proprietors of the Daily Telegraph, and they had brought him to London to act as assistant editor of that paper.

Macdonell was a typical journalist, of very fine character. He was an enthusiast, more than commonly perfervid, even for a Scot. Whatever he believed, he believed with all his heart and soul. He was always in earnest, and always striving to give effect to his opinions. His leaders were really polished essays, of remarkable point and brilliancy. His conversation was as striking and epigrammatic as his writing. He was inspired by generous impulses, and his soul was clean. One of his colleagues on the Telegraph declared that Macdonell evidently believed that his chief business in life was to frame syllogisms and apply them. He had a good deal of the temperament of the French man of letters, and to the enthusiasm of the Gaul he added a fine taste for style. In those early days in London he was full of the possibilities that lay before the penny Press, and predicted that the day was not far distant when the Daily Telegraph would supersede the Times as the chief organ of English opinion. He greatly admired the shrewdness of the proprietors of the paper, who, having no knowledge of literary quality themselves, had yet an unerring instinct for what was good in journalism. He delighted in one story which I have heard him relate more than once. He had been telling Alexander Russel, of the Scotsman, of the shrewd manner in which Mr. Levy, the principal owner of the Telegraph, had been criticising an article of which he did not quite approve. The writer had pleaded that the reasoning of the article was perfectly sound. "We don't want sound reason; we want sound writing," was Mr. Levy's response. When Macdonell repeated this to Russel, the great Edinburgh editor slapped his thigh, and cried, with an oath, "The Lord knew what He was about when He chose that people for His own!"

It was not to be Macdonell's fate to convert the Telegraph into a second Times. On the contrary, after a few years in Fleet Street, he himself went to Printing House Square, where he became, in the closing days of Delane's editorship of the Times, the principal political leader writer. He made a great mark in that capacity, and drew the Times a good deal further in the direction of advanced Liberalism than it has ever been drawn before or since. He was a strong hater of Mr. Disraeli's Imperial policy, and for a time the leading journal lent no countenance to that line of action. But the curb was put upon the enthusiastic leader writer, with his strong humanitarian views, and he had to see the paper with which he was identified taking a course of which he could not approve. To a man who threw his whole heart into his work, nothing could be more galling than this. Poor Macdonell fairly wore himself out with his ceaseless expenditure of nervous and intellectual force, and he died suddenly and prematurely in 1878. His death was, I think, the greatest blow to English journalism that it has received in my time. In 1868, however, Macdonell was still in the heyday of his physical and mental powers. We used to meet at the Arundel Club in the society that I have described. Sala, Tom Robertson, Swinburne, and others hardly less eminent, formed the company; and to these Macdonell, when he was moved to talk-as he frequently was-would pour out the epigrams in which he delighted. I can recall some of them that were very brilliant, but they are too personal to be repeated here.

Another friend of those days never attained to anything like fame. He died, as he had lived, a simple working journalist, and he is now remembered only by a handful of personal friends. Yet even now, more than twenty years after his death, I feel that Robert Donald was in many ways one of the most gifted men I have ever known. He had come from Edinburgh to fill a place in the Reporters' Gallery, and he added to his work as reporter that of London correspondent of the Glasgow Herald. With the rest of his intimate friends, I had an almost unbounded admiration for his gifts, and an unqualified belief in his future. We knew from constant and intimate intercourse the wealth of intellect and of feeling that he possessed, and we were convinced that when he revealed these riches to the world he would impress others as much as he had impressed us.

He had been engaged for years in writing a novel-a novel that, we were convinced, would be a notable addition to the great treasury of English literature. He was very reticent on the subject of this magnum opus, but at last he consented to submit the manuscript to me and to another friend with whom he was equally intimate, Mr. Charles Russell. I can recall the thrill of expectancy and delight with which I first turned to the voluminous pages of Donald's book. I can remember how I read on far into the night, revelling in the freshness and vigour of the style, in the brilliancy of the dialogue which abounded throughout the story, and in the insight into character and the grasp of human motives that were everywhere revealed. After I had read a hundred pages I was convinced that all our anticipations as to Donald's future fell short of the mark. But I read on and on, and slowly, yet certainly, a deadly sense of disappointment crept into my heart. It was not that there was any falling-off in the quality of the work. Every page was as fresh and as strong as those which preceded it. But when I had read a thousand pages-large pages, closely written-and had come to the end of that part of the work that he had finished, I made the appalling discovery that the story he had to tell had not advanced a single step beyond the point he had reached in the first chapter. Apparently it would require thousands of pages more to complete the tale, and the work was already as long as "Middlemarch" itself.

Donald had the faculty of writing admirably-far better, I still think, than any but the greatest of his contemporaries; but he lacked the chief essential of a novelist, the power of making his story march. Russell, when he read the manuscript, compared it to an immense torso, heroic in its proportions, splendid in its workmanship, but nothing more than a fragment after all. "And yet what a quarry it is!" he said to me when we were discussing it. "If only some inferior writer were allowed to dig into it, and transfer its gold and marble to his own pages!" My poor friend's personal story was a real tragedy. He accepted the advice we gave him, and, laying aside the huge unfinished manuscript, began to write what he meant to be a short and simple story. He submitted the opening chapters to the editor of the Glasgow Weekly Herald. That gentleman was delighted with it, and at once accepted the novel for publication in his journal. The first few weekly instalments were read with the keenest pleasure by everybody, and the hope ran high that we had found a new writer who was destined to take his place in the first rank of English authorship. But by-and-by the readers of the Herald made the discovery that had been made by myself when I read Donald's unfinished manuscript. Each chapter of the tale was brilliant in itself, but no single chapter advanced the movement of the story by a hair's breadth.

For weeks and months the novel ran its course, until the murmurs of discontent on the part of the readers swelled into a positive roar. Mr. Stoddart, the editor, who was a warm friend of Donald's, again and again implored him to expedite the development of the plot, and again and again he undertook to do so. But it was beyond his power to fulfil his promise. Then, one day, a terrible thing happened. I was lunching with Donald in a club in St. James's Street, one of the proprietors of the Herald (now dead) being also his guest. This gentleman suddenly turned to Donald, and speaking not with intentional brutality, but simply in the frankness of unrestrained good-fellowship, asked him "when that d--d long-winded story of his was going to stop?" adding that it must be got out of the way in a week or two, as they wanted to begin the publication of another. I saw how my poor friend turned pale at the cruel thrust. He faltered out a promise that he would finish the tale at once, but I felt that his heart was broken. He went home and bravely did his best to keep his promise, but he only found once more that the task was beyond his strength; and the unfortunate editor was reluctantly compelled to call in an outsider to put an end in a summary fashion to a story which had escaped completely from the grasp of its author. Donald never recovered from the blow. His own ambition was crushed and mortified, and the ardent hopes of his friends were all destroyed. He did not long survive this tragical experience. And yet what a man he was! And what capacities he possessed, capacities which would have enabled him to delight the world, if only he had not lacked the poor faculty of the storyteller!

These were two of my great friends during my first residence in London, and they were friends of whom any man might have been proud. Others I held scarcely less dear, but they are still, happily, living, and I must refrain from dwelling upon them. I had not been long settled in London before I found work of different kinds accumulating on my hands. I wrote London letters every week for the Madras Times, under the editorship of an old friend, James Sutherland, and I contributed to various provincial papers. But that which chiefly attracted me was literary work for the magazines, and it was in connection with this work that I first became acquainted with one of the dearest and most honoured of the friends of my life, James Payn. I had been for some years an occasional contributor to Chambers's Journal, and had received more than one encouraging note written in a hand that it was difficult to decipher, and simply signed, "Editor, C.J." At last it occurred to me that a series of descriptive articles relating to the places and scenes with which I had become familiar as a Parliamentary reporter might be accepted by the editor. With much trepidation-for I was still a neophyte in London literary life-I addressed a personal note to Mr. Payn, asking for an interview. I got a cordial reply, inviting me to call upon him at the office of Messrs. Chambers in Paternoster Row. Though I entered his presence with fear and trembling, in two minutes I was at my ease, and talking freely to the kindest and most generous man that ever wielded the editorial pen. Neither of us then knew how dear we were to become to each other, and how close and affectionate was to be our intercourse during more than twenty years.

To Payn I was, of course, merely a very humble contributor to the journal he edited; but I was received in a most friendly and cordial fashion, and found, much to my delight and not a little to my astonishment, that the brilliant man of letters before me was eager to recognise the bond which a common calling created between us. There was no air of patronage in his treatment of my modest proposals. He did what he could to make me feel that we stood on an equality. This was Payn all over. Throughout his life he was one of those men of letters who, whilst never sinking into the boon companionship of Bohemia, show their respect for the calling they have adopted by treating all the other members of that calling with an unaffected respect and cordiality. Such men are the salt of our order. Payn's generosity to young and unknown writers has been attested by many men who in later life attained eminence, to whom he gave the first helping hand in their long struggle against fate. When, in later days, I read these tributes to the splendid and unselfish service which Payn had rendered to English literature, I always recalled him as I saw him in the dingy office in Paternoster Row on that day in 1868, when he first gave me the right hand of fellowship. I shall have much to say of him hereafter. At this point I need only record the fact that I became a frequent contributor to Chambers's Journal, writing for it a series of articles, descriptive of the work of the journalist, that were afterwards republished in a volume called "Briefs and Papers." In this little book I collaborated with my old friend and schoolfellow, Mr. W. H. Cooke, who was the author of the chapters describing the experiences of a young barrister.

By-and-by, as I extended my connection with magazine work, I was brought into contact with Mrs. Riddell, the gifted writer of that admirable novel "George Geith," and of other stories of equal merit. Mrs. Riddell was the editor and proprietor of the St. James's Magazine, and I became a regular contributor to its pages. Here I was brought into intimate association with a phase of literary life which belongs rather to the past than to the present. Mrs. Riddell had achieved sudden fame by her brilliant stories. In these days such fame would have meant for her a handsome income and a recognised position in society. But forty years ago fame as a writer was not necessarily rewarded in this way. My first interview with Mrs. Riddell, who was a lady of delightful manners and charming appearance, took place literally in a cellar beneath a shop in Cheapside. The shop was her husband's, and here certain patent stoves, of which he was the inventor and manufacturer, were exposed for sale. I had been greatly surprised when Mrs. Riddell, wishing to speak to me about certain contributions to the St. James's Magazine, had asked me to call, not at the office in Essex Street, but at this shop in Cheapside. I was still more surprised on finding this gifted woman, in whose brilliant pages I had found so much to delight me, acting as her husband's clerk, and engaged in making out invoices in the cellar beneath the shop.

I am afraid that, in spite of her husband's occupation, I cannot give Mrs. Riddell a testimonial as a business woman. She was, as I have said, delightful as a writer, and charming as a woman, but her editorship of the St. James's Magazine did not suggest that she had the aptitude necessary to success in business. She was very kind to me, and gave me the opportunity of writing on any subject, and at almost any length, in the pages she controlled. More than once I have had three long articles in one number of the magazine; but I was always harassed by the fact that the magazine was never "out" on the proper day, and that the editor was always in a hurry for the copy I had to supply. My chief contributions to the St. James's were a series of sketches of statesmen, subsequently republished in a volume, entitled "Cabinet Portraits," another series of sketches of London preachers, and a novel called "The Lumley Entail."

This novel was my first venture in fiction, and one curious incident, at least, was connected with it. I had submitted to Mrs. Riddell nothing more than the first two or three chapters, and a synopsis of the plot, when I offered it to her. With a courage that was undoubtedly rash, she accepted the story forthwith, and decided to begin its publication at once. I was very busy with my newspaper work at the time, and in consequence could only write my monthly instalment in bare time for its inclusion in the coming number of the magazine. One awful day, when the St. James's for the current month was already overdue, I received a telegram from the publisher bidding me send in my instalment immediately, as they were waiting for it in order to go to press. I rushed to the office in a state of consternation, and explained to the man that I had duly sent in my manuscript more than a week before. "I know that," he said quite coolly; "I got it myself, and gave it to Mrs. Riddell; but unfortunately she has lost it, so you will have to write it over again." Here was a pretty dilemma for a budding novelist! I did not take "The Lumley Entail" so seriously as I should have done, and I had a very vague recollection of the contents of the lost instalment; but there was no help for it. I had to sit down there and then in the office in Essex Street, and write another instalment of equal length. It was altogether different from that which it was meant to replace, and I have no doubt that it changed materially the fortunes of the more or less human beings who figured in my tale. Such, however, was the fate of a young contributor in the hands of an unbusinesslike editor.

But, as I have said, Mrs. Riddell, apart from her imperfect observance of editorial customs, was a delightful woman. She and her husband lived in a rambling old house in the Green Lanes, Tottenham. Here she entertained many of the notable men of letters of her time, and here I had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of not a few of them. The establishment was a somewhat primitive one. The workshop in which Mr. Riddell carried on the manufacture of his patent stoves was at the back of the house, and a rather large central hall, dividing the dining-room and the drawing-room, was used as a kind of show-room in which choice specimens of Mr. Riddell's wares were displayed. The special feature of these patent stoves was that they were ornamental as well as useful. They were made to look like anything but what they were. One stove appeared in the guise of a table, richly ornamented in cast-iron; another was a vase; a third a structure like an altar, and so forth. But whatever their appearance might be, they all were stoves. One winter's night, when there was an inch of snow on the ground, I went out to the Green Lanes to attend one of Mrs. Riddell's literary parties. It was bitterly cold, and one of the stoves in the hall had been lighted for the comfort of the guests. We were a merry company, including, if I remember aright, George Augustus Sala, and some other well-known journalists. In the course of the evening Mrs. Riddell asked a well-known barrister, who at that time dabbled a little in literature, and who has since risen to fame and to a knighthood, to favour us with a song. He was an innocent young man in those days, and tried to excuse himself. "Now, Mr. C--," said Mrs. Riddell, "I know you have brought some music with you, so you must get it and do as I wish." The young man admitted that he had brought music, and blushingly retired to the hall in quest of it. Suddenly, those of us who were standing near the door heard a groan of anguish, and, looking out, we saw Mr. C-- holding in one hand the charred remains of a roll of music, and in the other the remnants of what had once been an excellent overcoat. He had laid his coat, when he arrived, on what was apparently a hall table. Unluckily for him, it happened to be the patent stove that had been lighted that evening to cheer and warm us when we escaped from the storm outside. I draw a veil over the subsequent proceedings.

I believe it was on this very evening that I heard Sala utter one of those jocosely brutal sentences for which he was celebrated. The literary men who frequented Mrs. Riddell's house were not, I am sorry to say, so respectful to her husband as they might have been. They made it very clear, in fact, that it was the novelist and not the inventor of stoves whom they came to see, and they were impatient when the latter attempted to intrude his views upon them. A party of us were gathered in the dining-room, smoking and otherwise refreshing ourselves. We had been listening to story after story from some of the best talkers in the Bohemia of those days, and again and again the attempts of Mr. Riddell to contribute to our entertainment by some long-winded narration had been vigorously and successfully repulsed. At last the unhappy host found an opening, and had got so far as "What you were saying reminds me of an interesting anecdote I once heard," when Sala, striking his fist upon the table, thundered a stentorian "Stop, sir!" Mr. Riddell looked at him, half frightened, half indignant. "If the story you propose to tell us," continued Sala, "is an improper one, I wish to tell you that we have heard it already; and if it is not improper, we don't want to hear it at all." Yes, clearly one had wandered into Bohemia in those days.

My work in the Gallery of the House of Commons was of great interest. I watched Disraeli during his first brief premiership in 1868, when he had to hold the reins of authority in a House in which his party was really in a minority, and when he had nightly to confront the fierce attacks of Mr. Gladstone, who was rallying his own followers, both in the House and in the country, for their successful onslaught upon the Government. It was a unique and most valuable experience to watch these two great men in their gladiatorial combats across the table of the House: Gladstone wielding the mighty broadsword of his powerful eloquence, and seeming as if at every moment he would annihilate his antagonist; Disraeli, with marvellous skill and exquisite adroitness, bringing the rapier of his wit to bear upon his opponent, and again and again pinking him with some stinging epigram or smart retort that set all the Tory benches roaring with delight. It made one's young blood grow warmer to watch the struggle from the impartial height of the Reporters' Gallery.

I was in the House on that memorable occasion when Disraeli made a speech which astounded his followers so much that they were only able to account for it by the hypothesis that he had taken too much to drink. This is a harsh way of stating the case, but there is no doubt a measure of truth in it. Disraeli was not a self-indulgent man, but in those days his devotion to his duties in the House was so great that he would sometimes sit all the evening listening to a debate without taking any food, and in his dinnerless condition the stimulant he took before making his speech in reply occasionally got into his head. Certainly, in the memorable speech on the Irish Church question, to which I allude, he was betrayed into excesses for which some justification was necessary. I remember seeing him, at the close of that speech, draw his handkerchief from his pocket and wave it round his head, before he sank back exhausted on the Treasury bench; and I can still see the pale and angry face of Mr. Gladstone as he sprang to his feet to reply, and hear the stern tones in which he referred to "the excitement-the too obvious excitement-of the right honourable gentleman."

Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff has recently furnished the world with many volumes of personal reminiscences. He does not include among those reminiscences any reference to a scene which I witnessed in the House of Commons during Disraeli's first brief premiership, although Sir Mountstuart was himself the hero of the occasion. It was one Wednesday afternoon. There was an empty House and a dull debate, but Disraeli was in his place on the Treasury Bench, so that anything might happen. It pleased the Mr. Grant Duff of those days to deliver himself of a philippic, at once voluminous and violent, against the Prime Minister. He quoted the opinions of foreign critics to the disadvantage of Mr. Disraeli; he emphasised them by fine flights of his own imagination; and he illustrated his speech with a wealth of gesticulation and a variety of intonation that convulsed his scanty audience with laughter. People wondered mildly what punishment was in store for the audacious man who was thus breaking one of the unwritten canons of the House, for in those days it was regarded as bad form on the part of a man not himself in the front rank to attack one in the position of Mr. Disraeli. As the speech proceeded, the Prime Minister sat in his favourite attitude, his arms folded, his head slightly bent forward, and his vacant eyes fixed upon the points of his boots. He might have been carved in stone for any trace of emotion that he displayed. We in the Gallery anticipated that this air of absolute indifference was to be the punishment of his rash assailant. But to our surprise, when Grant Duff sat down, Disraeli instantly sprang to his feet. As he did so, he raised his single glass to his eye, and looked fixedly across the House to the spot where the member for Elgin was slowly composing himself after his mighty effort. For some seconds Disraeli, with an air of cold, cynical aloofness, continued to gaze at the unfortunate man. Then, with a favourite action, he suddenly dropped the glass from his eye, and, waving his hand with an airy gesture of contempt, said, "I shall not detain the House, sir, by referring to the-the exhibition we have just witnessed; but I merely wish to say in reply to an honourable member below the gangway," and so on. This was, I think, the most cruel speech I ever heard Disraeli make, and for the moment it seemed to have a crushing effect upon its subject.

In those days Disraeli was not the Tory idol he subsequently became. I well remember, on the historic evening when Mr. Gathorne Hardy moved the adjournment of the House because of the absence of Mr. Disraeli at Windsor, and the news instantly spread that Lord Derby had resigned and Mr. Disraeli had become Prime Minister in his place, that there was a hubbub-not merely of excitement, but of disapproval-in the Lobby. Tory members of the old school were furious at having "that Jew," as they contemptuously styled him, set over them. I walked from the House that evening with Sir Edward Baines and Mr.-afterwards Sir Charles-Forster. They were both full of the dislike felt on the Tory side for the change in the leadership of their party. It is strange to note how quickly the views of a party change with regard to its leaders. I remember the time when the idea that Mr. Gladstone would ever be Prime Minister was treated with ridicule by not a few of those who sat beside him in Parliament. I have myself heard Mr. Disraeli assailed in scornful and sarcastic terms by Lord Salisbury, and have listened to his sneering retort. Even after Disraeli became Prime Minister in 1868 it is notorious that the Duke of Buccleuch refused to entertain him as his guest when he visited Scotland to rally the party before the General Election of that year. It was on the occasion of this visit that he gave such offence to the graver section of the Tories by the speech in which, explaining the genesis of the Household Suffrage Act, he used the words, "I educated my party." A few years later the whole party was proud of having been educated by him; but when he made this speech his words were regarded as an insolent display of vanity on the part of an upstart who had elbowed his way to the front at the expense of better men.

My only personal encounter with the great Tory leader was connected with this same speech at Edinburgh. I went to Aylesbury, during the course of the 1868 election, in order to report a speech of his. He spoke in the Corn Exchange, which was crowded to excess. The accommodation for the reporters was quite unequal to their demands, and I had to stand among the crowd and take my notes as best I could. A good-natured farmer in front of me invited me to use his back as a desk, against which I placed my note-book. Disraeli had not proceeded very far with his speech before I found that my friend was not by any means in agreement with the illustrious speaker. Again and again he interrupted him with exclamations and questions. For a long time Disraeli took no notice of these interruptions, but at last one stung him into action. The orator had paused for a moment, and my farmer friend, seizing his chance, bawled out in a stentorian voice, "What about educating your party?" The Prime Minister instantly turned round, raised his glass to his eye, and with an angry and contemptuous glare, transfixed-me! The farmer's courage had given way when he found that his shot had told, and, to my unutterable disgust, he dropped upon his knees, and left me to face the music. Disraeli looked at me for a perceptible space of time, and then, dropping his glass, said, in those chilling tones of which he was a master, "I shall certainly not try to educate you, sir." Everybody stared at me; everybody groaned at me; and it was only the consciousness of my own innocence that kept me from dropping on my knees beside the treacherous author of my humiliation.

In that election of 1868 I recorded my first parliamentary vote. Living at 24, Addison Road North, I was an elector of Chelsea, and I duly supported at the polling booth the joint candidature of Sir Charles Dilke and Sir Henry Hoare. This was the last General Election before the passing of the Ballot Bill. Representatives of the different candidates sat on either side of the poll clerk, and duly thanked each elector as he recorded his vote for the man whom they represented.

I wrote an article in the St. James's Magazine describing the opening day of the session of the new Household Suffrage Parliament. It was called "The Birthday of an Era," and, looking back, I think I was fully entitled to make use of that somewhat high-sounding phrase. It was the beginning of the Gladstonian epoch in English history, and, for good or for evil (in my own opinion mainly for good), it was destined to make a deep impression on the institutions and fortunes of the nation. When Mr. Gladstone entered upon his first term of office as Prime Minister, he was certainly surrounded by a wonderful band of colleagues. They included Lord Granville, Lord Hartington, Lord Kimberley, Mr. Lowe, Mr. Bright, Mr. Cardwell, Mr. Childers, Mr. Bruce, and Mr. Forster. In my time no stronger ministry than this has had power in England. The men I admired most after Mr. Gladstone were Mr. Bright and Mr. Forster. I had not yet made the personal acquaintance of Forster, and did not dream of the close ties by which we were eventually to be united; but I was drawn to him from the very first by an instinctive feeling of liking and esteem. His blunt speech, his careless dress, his unpolished but genuine manners, all seemed to me to mark him out as that rare creature a thoroughly honest politician; and whilst I sat in the Reporters' Gallery, there was no one after Mr. Gladstone whose speeches delighted me more than did those of Forster.

Before the Ministry had been long in office I was brought into contact with one of its members, Mr. W.E. Baxter, the Secretary to the Admiralty. Mr. Baxter was a great reformer and a financial purist. When he went to the Admiralty he found extravagance and confusion, not to speak of corruption, pervading all the departments connected with the provision of matériel for the Fleet. He set to work at once, with the vigour of the new broom, to cleanse the Augean stable. Naturally he excited the bitter hostility of those whose personal interests were affected by his action, and these, being in many cases persons of influence, were able to inspire attacks upon his policy in the leading organs of the daily press in London. I, in my small way, as London correspondent of the Leeds Mercury, had defended him against some of these attacks. Baxter noticed my defence, and sought me out in order to thank me for it. He did more than this. He proposed that I should hear from him from time to time how he was advancing in his work of reorganisation and reform, and should make the facts known to the public through the columns of the Mercury. This was great promotion for me. In those days the provincial press had no direct connection with Ministers or the leaders of parties; and the "London correspondent" was not in a position to supply his readers with news at first hand, or with any news, indeed, that was at once original and authentic. Through Mr. Baxter I suddenly found myself placed in a position that enabled me to provide the Leeds Mercury with political and administrative news that was not only of the highest importance, but that had not appeared anywhere else. For Mr. Baxter was better than his word. When I went, as I did several times a week, to see him at the Admiralty, he not only told me all that was going on in his own department, but all that could be published with regard to the proceedings of the Government as a whole. I think I am correct in saying that I was at that time the only correspondent of a provincial newspaper who was favoured in this way, and my letter to the Mercury began to be read and quoted in many different quarters. Certainly my position was made both easier and more important by this friendship with Mr. Baxter.

During the whole of 1869 I attended the debates in Parliament, and watched with eager sympathy the progress of the Government in the heavy task that it had set itself. The passing of the Bill for disestablishing the Irish Church was the chief business of that memorable session. The speaking on both sides was at the highest level. In the House of Commons, Gladstone, Disraeli, Bright, Lowe, and Gathorne Hardy distinguished themselves above all others. But the palm for oratory, as has so often been the case, was borne off by the House of Lords. That House presented a brilliant spectacle during the debates on the second reading of the Bill which the majority of the peers detested so heartily. The speaking against the measure was far more effective than that in its favour. Indeed, at this distance of time I can only recall one speech by a supporter of the Bill which impressed itself so strongly upon me as to remain fresh in my memory after the lapse of more than thirty years. That was the speech of Dr. Connop Thirlwall, Bishop of St. David's, who was courageous enough to stand against his brethren, and to prefer the claims of justice to those of the Establishment in which he was a leading figure. On the other hand, two at least of the speeches delivered against the Bill are still vividly present to my mind. The first was the speech of Dr. Magee, Bishop of Peterborough, an extraordinary display of florid and flowing eloquence. It moved the House so greatly that when he sat down the Tory peers rose, almost in a body, and rushing across the floor, offered him their personal congratulations and handshakes in recognition of his success. Such a scene, common enough in foreign Chambers, was almost without precedent in our cold and stately House of Lords. The other memorable speech was that of Lord Derby, "the Rupert of debate." Though I had no sympathy with his views, I could not but admire the almost passionate fervour with which he pleaded for the Irish Church, and the indignation with which he denounced those who were bent upon despoiling it. I remember his quoting with dramatic effect the curse uttered by Meg Merrilees upon Ellan-gowan-a curse which he intended, of course, to apply to Mr. Gladstone. It was the last speech that Lord Derby ever made. When the announcement of the final surrender of the Peers, after the Bill had passed through Committee, was made by Lord Cairns, I saw Lord Derby rise from his seat and, with a face inflamed with indignation, hobble swiftly out of the Chamber. He never entered it again.

This incident belongs to the tragedy of politics; but the debates on the Irish Church Bill in the House of Lords were not without their touches of comedy. One of these was supplied by Lord Westbury, the ex-Liberal Lord Chancellor. He made a very amusing, a very bitter, and an almost wholly inaudible speech against the Bill. The older peers, with their hands behind their ears, clustered round him to catch his witticisms, some even kneeling on the floor in order to be near enough to hear him. They chuckled and laughed consumedly, but we unfortunate reporters in the Gallery had but the faintest idea of what it was they were laughing at. One sentence I did indeed catch, and still remember. It was to the effect that if the Irish Church were disestablished there would be no provision for the celebration of holy matrimony in Ireland in accordance with Protestant rites. "Was it possible," Lord Westbury asked, with simulated indignation, "that the authors of this iniquitous measure really meant to drive all the unmarried Protestants of Ireland into mortal sin?" The old peers around him enjoyed this effort of the imagination mightily.

The other comic incident I remember was of a different kind. The Archbishop of Dublin, Dr. Trench, on behalf of his fellow-prelates, made a long speech against the Bill. Dr. Trench was a man of very high character and fine talent, but he was not at home in the House of Lords, or, indeed, in a political speech. When he advanced to the table of the House, he caused a slight titter by producing an unmistakable black sermon case, and spreading it open before him. By-and-by, as he proceeded with his sonorous but somewhat melancholy discourse, everybody perceived that he was preaching a sermon. The intonation of his voice, the phraseology, the measured sweep of the hands, all smacked of the pulpit. The whole House listened eagerly, and watched intently for the accident that was certain to happen. At last it came. "I beseech you, my brethren," said the Archbishop, in a moment of apostolic absence of mind, and the whole House exploded in a roar of long-suppressed laughter, which made it impossible to learn the nature of the Primate's appeal.

For any man of intelligence the position of a parliamentary reporter is one of great interest and full of great possibilities. In my days in the Gallery there was, as I have already stated, little communication between the Gallery and the House proper. The art of exploiting the Press had not yet become familiar to the politicians, and a great gulf seemed to be fixed between the reporters and the members. Since then, that gulf has almost disappeared, and not a few men have stepped down from the Reporters' Gallery to the floor of the House. But our very aloofness from the inner side of parliamentary life, with its personal interests and its incessant intrigues, strengthened our position as independent critics and observers. We looked on as at a play in which we ourselves had no part, and those who possessed the instinct for politics which is the gift of the born journalist were able to see more and learn more from our independent standpoint than many of the actual actors saw and learned. Some of the most capable of our political writers and critics were trained in the Gallery. One of my most intimate friends in those days was Mr. Mudford, who subsequently became known to fame as the editor of the Standard, and who built up that journal's great reputation. Of Mudford's capacity as an editor it is hardly necessary to speak here, but I may note in passing that even in his early days in the Gallery he displayed the marked characteristics which distinguished him when he was at once the ablest and the least known of London editors. His independence of character was even then combined with a strong indisposition to make many acquaintances, or to cut any figure in public. It was my privilege to be counted thus early in his career among his friends, and I am glad to say that it is a privilege which I still enjoy.

My stay in London was brought to an end in the early part of 1870, amid circumstances that changed the whole tenor of my life, and for a time left me a crippled and wounded man. I have said nothing in these pages of my private life or my domestic happiness. My marriage had proved to be, in all respects save one, everything that the heart of man could desire. The one drawback was my wife's delicate health; but she had shown such marvellous recuperative powers at times when the doctors had spoken in the gravest manner of her case, and she possessed so unfailing a flow of natural good spirits, that it was impossible for one who, perhaps, saw only that which he desired to see, to believe that her case was hopeless. Yet hopeless it really was during the whole of the two short years of her married life. Her death-it took place on the 4th of February-was a blow that seemed to shatter my own life to its very foundations. I cannot dwell upon it, unless it be to say that at that time of unspeakable sorrow I first learned the value of human sympathy, and made the discovery that there are, happily, in this world not a few men and women who seem to have the gift of being able, not indeed to remove, but to share and to lighten the burdens of their fellow-creatures. It is only those who have gone through such an ordeal as this of mine who can fully understand all that human sympathy may be in that hour of darkest woe when a man, still standing on the threshold of life, finds himself alone in a world which to him has suddenly become an empty desert.

One incident, and one only, of those days I will venture to recall. I was walking along the Strand in the blackest hours of my misery, when I saw an old man approaching me whose depth of mourning showed that he had sustained the same bereavement as myself. There was probably a difference of fifty years in our ages, but we were alike in the sacred kinship of sorrow. As he drew near me I saw his eyes fixed upon mine with a long look of tenderness and sympathy that went to my very heart, and comforted me subtly. I envied him his age, which seemed to bring him so much nearer to the end. I do not think he envied me my youth. It was but for a moment that we were thus drawn to each other in the crowded street-"ships that passed in the night," in the darkest night, indeed; but that moment I have never forgotten.