Clement Scott was another of the “young lions.” He was not very popular with the other members of the staff. Sala, I know, disliked him, for he told me so. Scott was the dramatic critic of the paper. He wrote a sugary, young-ladylike style that “took” with a large section of the public. It was a chocolate-creamy style, and “went down”—like chocolate creams. He understood the value of a phrase, and when he got hold of an effective one he ran it to death. For instance, there are poppies in the cornfields round Cromer. Probably there is a much greater profusion of poppies in cornfields in Kent or in Bucks, but Scott gives to Cromer a kind of monopoly in the right sort of poppy. The country in that part of East Anglia he “wrote up” as “Poppyland,” to the great advantage of the Great Eastern Railway Company, to which corporation he became a sort of unofficial Poet Laureate. When I first knew him, Scott had not yet “discovered” Cromer or written the syrupy sentiments of “The Garden of Sleep.” He was eloquent at that period over the beauties of the Isle of Thanet, for “Clemmy” was a personal friend of Mr. Joseph Moses Levy, the principal proprietor of the _Telegraph_, and was frequently his guest somewhere in the neighbourhood of Ramsgate. Clement Scott always took himself very seriously. Now, that was a pose rarely adopted by the journalists of my day. We regarded our calling as a means of obtaining a livelihood, certainly, and to that extent a serious occupation, but in the pursuit of it we gave ourselves no airs. We considered the whole business rather good fun, and were upheld by a consciousness of the fact that we were all more or less humbugs. Scott’s nonsense, however, suited the nonsense of the followers of Peterborough Court, and at a time of general scepticism it was refreshing to encounter a man who believed in something, even if that something happened to be himself.