It is true that after a successful managerial career lasting over many years his luck deserted him, and his theatre fell into other hands, but the period of undimmed success during which he kept burning that which he called “the sacred lamp of burlesque” was one upon which he might look back with considerable satisfaction. He was in many directions a reformer. He abolished the programme fee. He refused to sublet his cloak-rooms to the harpies who at that time held an undisputed monopoly for at once incommoding and fleecing the playgoers who booked for the stalls and boxes. He was the first man in London who installed the electric light. He did not, indeed, use it as an illuminant inside his theatre—electric lighting was in its infancy, and had not as yet been tried as an indoor illuminant—but he burned a fierce, if blinking, electric globe over the main entrance to the Gaiety, and he should have the obituary honours due to the pioneer. Gradually I became on intimate terms with Hollingshead, and remained a friend of his until his lamented death. Some millions—I am speaking by the card—had passed through his hands to actors, authors, musicians, and the rest of the vast army required to carry on the business of a successful theatre. Yet he died in somewhat straitened circumstances. His courage and his equable temper, however, did not desert him. He was a bit of a fatalist, I fancy. He spoke jauntily of being “equal to either fortune.” Originally he had been on the Press. He was one of the staff of Charles Dickens on _Household Words_ and _All the Year Round_. He wrote for Thackeray on the _Cornhill_, and for Norman Macleod on _Good Words_. Indeed, in the sixties his work was in general demand by the magazine editors. The daily paper with which he was most intimately associated was the _Daily News_, for which his particular friend Moy Thomas was dramatic critic. When he severed his connection with journalism, he characteristically observed that a journalist is like a barrel-organ—wound up to play so many tunes, and that when he has “run down” it is time for him to retire. Which, I may parenthetically mention, would have been a sad doctrine for some of us. No figure was more familiar in the Strand, Garrick Street, and the West End than that of Hollingshead in the halcyon days of the Gaiety. His good looks, his neat attire, his silvery hair, his hat cocked a trifle on one side, his brisk walk, his cheery expression, and his generally debonair appearance, suggested even to the outsider the busy, competent, yet good-natured, man of affairs. He was an excellent talker, very fond of paradox. A utilitarian philosopher, he was a follower of Jeremy Bentham. It was difficult to gather from his views as given in conversation what his political convictions really were. I once asked him the question. He readily replied in that curious but modulated falsetto of his. “I’m a Tory Socialist,” was his answer.