Alere Flamma, artist, engraver, bookbinder, connoisseur, traveller, printer, Republican, conspirator, sot, smoker, dreamer, poet, kind-hearted, good-natured, prodigal, shiftless, man of Fleet Street, carpet-bag man, gentleman shaken to pieces. He worked in his shirt-sleeves and drank stout, but nothing vulgar had ever been recorded against Alere Flamma. He frequented strong company--very strong meat--but no vile word left his lips. There was a delicacy in all his ways in the midst of the coarsest surroundings, just as he appeared in the press-room among the printer's ink in the whitest of clean shirt-sleeves, fit to wear with the abhorred dress-coat. In his rooms at his lodgings there were literally hundreds of sketches, done on all sorts and sizes of paper, from the inside of an envelope hastily torn open to elephant. The bureau was full of them, crammed in anyhow, neither sorted nor arranged; nothing, of course, could be found if it was wanted. The drawers of the bookcase--it was his own furniture--were full of them; the writing-table drawer; a box in one corner; some were on the mantelpiece smoked and gritty; some inside his books, most of which were interleaved in this manner; literally hundreds of sketches, the subjects as numerous and varied. Views in English country lanes, views on the Danube, bands playing in band-loving Vienna, old Highgate Archway, studies from Canterbury Cathedral, statuary in the Louvre, ships battling with the north wind in the North Sea--a savage fight between sail and gale--horses in the meadow, an aged butler, a boy whipping a top, charcoal-burners in the Black Forest, studies from the nude--Parisian models, Jewesses, almost life-size, a drayman heaving up a huge tankard, overshadowing his face like Mount Atlas turned over his thumb, designs to illustrate classical mythology, outlines expressing the ideas of Goethe--outlines of Marguerite and Faust among the roses--"He loves me; he loves me not," big-armed Flemish beauties with breasts as broad as the Zuyder-Zee was deep in the song, roofs of Nuremberg, revolutionary heroes charging their muskets in the famous year '48, when Alere had a bullet through his hat, in Vienna, I think; no end to them. Sometimes when Alere had done no work for a month or two, and his ten pounds were spent, if he wanted a few guineas he would take a small selection of these round to the office of a certain illustrated paper; the Editor would choose, and hand over the money at once, well aware that it was ready money his friend needed. They were not exactly friends--there are no friends in London, only acquaintances--but a little chummy, because the Editor himself had had a fiery youth, and they had met in sunny Wien. That was the only paper that ever got sketches out of Alere.