He will recall with delight his experience of the dandies and the dullards, the wits and the wantons, with whom he came in contact during his excursions in those higher altitudes. Actors and actresses were, of course, his ordinary prey. Among the stars of the dramatic firmament he revolved in an amity now and then disturbed by some notice less fulsome than the object of it may have deemed acceptable. But on the whole the terms existing in my time between Press and Stage were those of immense consideration each for each. That the love of each for each has grown more ardent in these later days may be attributable to the prodigious increase in the advertising orders received by newspaper managers from the managers of playhouses. Painters were less amenable. Them you had to meet socially. They had the least possible respect for the professional journalist’s opinion of pictures. They affected to ignore newspaper criticism of their exhibited works, or, if they were thrust upon them, shuddered as they read. Artists in black-and-white found their way to Fleet Street, but their dealings were confined to the illustrated papers. The first time that a drawing appeared in a daily paper was, if I remember rightly, when the _Daily Telegraph_ published what it called “a portrait sketch” of Lefroy the murderer, a publication which led, it may be remembered, to the arrest of that miscreant. To-day the black-and-white artist is in the ascendant, and I entertain a pious hope that the day is not far off when its critics will habitually say of a newspaper, not that it is well or ill “written,” but that it is well or ill “drawn.” This book will be largely anecdotal. I may therefore be permitted at this point—irrelevantly and parenthetically—to introduce a reminiscence of Oscar Wilde which the mention of Lefroy recalls to me; I might forget it later. I was sitting at Romano’s in the company of that clever and ill-fated genius shortly after the trial of Lefroy. Wilde was amusing the company with his affectations and paradoxes. “If,” he said, in his ineffably superior way—“if I were not a poet, and could not be an artist, I should wish to be a murderer.” “What!” exclaimed one of us, “and have your portrait-sketch in the _Daily Telegraph_?” “Better that,” cooed Wilde, “than to go down to the sunless grave unknown.” On the same occasion the merits of Irving—then attracting the town—came up for discussion. Wilde was a warm supporter of the actor’s methods, and indulged in a strain of exaggerated praise over the performance then holding the boards at the Lyceum. “But what about his legs?” inquired an irreverent listener. “Irving’s legs,” answered Wilde, with the manner of a man who is promulgating some eternal truth—“Irving’s legs are distinctly precious, _but his left leg is a poem_!”