On the magazine, to which I had pledged myself, I commenced as a poet, a poem being the only thing I had by me. The cousinly proprietor—an extremely pleasant old gentleman, also named Ainsworth—appeared glad to accept _anything_. He was the only person whom I have known literally to laugh over misfortunes. He was a septuagenarian Mark Tapley. He gave excellent dinners at Ravenscourt Park—the house in which he entertained has long since been reduced to what printers call “pie,” its place being covered with brand-new “mansions” and “gardens” and villas. It speaks volumes for the old gentleman’s good-nature that, when my “poem” appeared, filling five pages of his periodical, he never uttered a word of rebuke or reproach. That was forty years ago, and I still regard the incident with gratitude, for the composition was a narrative of great duration. The scene was laid in Italy, the subject romantic, and the verse written in heroic couplets, interspersed with lyrics after the manner made fashionable by the Poet Laureate. I never saw it again after my first rapturous readings, but I have little doubt that it was sad stuff. I then resolutely set myself to keep my proprietor fed up with prose essays. I had the material, and I took no end of pains with the setting. They were for the most part essays in literary criticism, and one or two of them attracted the attention of the right sort of people. Many years after its appearance, I was surprised and gratified to find one of these early articles quoted in the _Athenæum_ by Theodore Watts-Dunton, and quoted, moreover, by that distinguished man of letters as being authoritative. Alas! by the time this appreciation of my literary research and criticism appeared I had ceased to take myself very seriously, and I was mixing in a society that did not take _anything_ very seriously. In my early years I had the run of a good dramatic library, particularly rich in editions of the Elizabethan masters. The majority of my essays of this period were derived from those boyish studies, fortified by later browsings in the reading-room of the British Museum. The eminent but erratic Irish gentleman with whom I was reading Law had suggested the Museum, little imagining the direction which my researches there were sometimes to take. To which of these fugitive pieces of the Ainsworthonian period of my novitiate I owed my introduction to Madox Brown, the celebrated Pre-Raphaelite painter, I cannot distinctly recall. Clearly, it would not have been to that terrible Italian romance in heroic couplets. But the thing happened somehow, and I still remember the pleasurable sensations I experienced when Oliver, the son of the great artist, called on me by appointment and took me round to the house in Fitzroy Square, to be introduced to his father. Madox Brown was a handsome man, of medium height, broad-shouldered, with a wiry beard, at that time just beginning to show the grey autumnal tints.