I was at a Bohemian party given by Val Bromley one night at his studios in Bloomsbury Square, when there was an amusing exhibition of the system adopted by Sothern and Wyndham to arouse the anxiety of poor Bruce. All three of them happened to be at this jolly function. At about one o’clock in the morning a sudden altercation broke out between Sothern and Wyndham; they stood in the middle of the studio in attitudes of menace, their voices were raised. “Never dare to speak to me again!” shouted one of the angry men. “You are a contemptible scoundrel, sir!” roared the other. The war of words grew hot, the gestures more threatening, and Bruce ran from friend to friend in the room, crying: “For Heaven’s sake pacify them! My whole future is ruined if those two men quarrel!” He spoke with the greatest emotion, and his face was deadly pale. At length one of the disputants cried out: “A friend of mine will wait upon you in the morning, sir!” and strode out of the room, speedily followed by his brother-conspirator. Soon after this the whole thing was “given away” by one or other, or by both, of the authors of the joke. But the curious part of the thing is that Edgar Bruce had for six months so convinced himself that he was a manager that he could not rid himself of the character. He had achieved the reputation. He had, moreover, made openings for himself among performers, costumiers, authors, and musicians. In six months he had gained experience of the managerial methods, and, being a manager in imagination, he crystallized into a manager in reality. His first managerial experiment was, I think, at the Royalty Theatre in Dean Street, Soho. Here he engaged as his representative in front of the house a comparatively unknown young man called Augustus Harris, little imagining that he was employing an Augustus Druriolanus in the making. He subsequently built the Lyric Theatre, and he died a comparatively rich man. The theatrical career of Edgar Bruce is the only practically good thing that I have known to result from the playing of a practical joke. These carefully-devised experiments on a large scale, becoming known, naturally fired the ambition of imitators and a number of gabies, whose only indication of humour consisted in the fatuous smirk with which they greeted one in season and out of season, set up as professors of the game. Certain of these misguided young men formed themselves into a nomadic club called “The Who-bodies.” But a better name for them was invented by Wallis Mackay, who lashed them unmercifully in his “Captious Critic” under the name of “Theodore Hooklings.”