During the seventies and eighties I knew my Fleet Street well. I worked among its presses; was on intimate terms with many of its most famous habitués; revelled in its atmosphere; and, in a word, lived its strenuous but happy life. And I would wish no better now—could such things be—than to live it all over again: granted, of course, that I lived it under the same conditions and among the same companions. Under the conditions and among the companions described in “The Street of Adventure,” a survivor of the seventies or eighties would find life intolerable. For the conditions, as described, are degrading, and the companionship unwholesome and depressing. It is impossible to catch the new atmosphere, to visualize the new journalist. And any nascent desire I may once have cherished to visit the scenes of my ancient labours has been effectually quenched by the perusal of these squalid records. The time occupied in the unfolding of the drama which marks our author’s starting-point commences with the founding of an important daily paper, and ends with the foundering of the same. The _dramatis personæ_ belong entirely to the staff of the wonderful party organ, with the proprietor, shadowy but maleficent, brooding over the adventure like a gloomy and heartily detested Fate. In making the acquaintance of the members of the staff I am being introduced to a new race. I recognize nothing in character, equipment, or even in physique, that for a moment recalls the figures of the past. For “there were giants on the earth in those days.” The characters represented here are anæmic, neurotic, hysterical. Their professional avocation brings them into competition with women, and the conditions of their service involves working with them as colleagues and accepting them as comrades. This intimate professional association may account for the hysterics—to some extent. But it does not account for the infinite joylessness which is the dominant note of the record. The various characters seem to move in a fuliginous cloud beyond which they are always scenting disaster. Should the disaster ensue, they are as men and women without hope. When, in effect, the dreaded calamity does overtake them—not without due notice—they are like mountain sheep in a thunder-storm: awe-stricken and helpless. We of a brisker time might, under similar circumstances, have imitated sheep in that we would have had recourse to our “damns.” But the gentlemen of “The Street of Adventure” have not spirit enough even for that. To change the figure: Their ship has foundered; they abandon themselves to their fate, for not one of them can swim.