Thus far the reputation which Theodore Watts had attained did not altogether belie him, but there was yet another “Theodore Watts”--“Watts of the _Athenæum_” he was sometimes called--who had no existence except in the imagination of certain small literary fry by whom he was popularly supposed to be something of a “Hun” of the pen, a shark of the literary seas, who preyed upon suckling poets. I remember a morning in the early nineties, when I was to lunch at Putney with Watts-Dunton and Swinburne. Being in the neighbourhood of Temple Bar about eleven, I turned in for a cup of coffee and a cigarette at a famous Coffee House, then much frequented by editors, journalists, poets, rising authors and members of the literary staff of the publishing houses and newspaper offices in or around Fleet Street, as well as by members of the legal profession from the Temple and the New Law Courts. At the next table sat a young man with long hair, a velveteen jacket and a flowing tie. He was talking so loudly to a friend, that unless one stopped one’s ears there was no choice but to overhear the conversation. “Seen this week’s _Athenæum_?” he asked his friend. “Not yet. Anything particular in it?” was the reply. “Only a review of my poems.” “Good?” “Bad as it can be--bad, that is, as four contemptuous lines of small print can make it. A book, which as you know represents the thought, the passion and soul-travail of years; a book written in my heart’s blood--and dismissed by the _Athenæum_ in four contemptuous lines!” There was a pause too brief, if not too deep for tears. Then: “Theodore Watts, of course!” he added between set teeth. “I expected it. Everyone knows he is so insanely jealous of us younger men that he watches the publishers’ lists for every book by a young poet of ability to pounce upon it, and to cut it up. What has he done, I should like to know, to give him the right to pronounce death sentences? Why, the fellow’s never even published a book of his own. “Shall I tell you why? He _daren’t_. There is a novel called _Aylwin_ written and ready to publish many years ago. Murray has offered him a small fortune in advance royalties, I hear.” Again the young man paused dramatically and looked darkly around the room, not apparently from fear of his being overheard, but because he wished to invite attention to the inner and exclusive knowledge which he possessed. Then, in an ecstasy of anger that had a fine disregard for so trivial a matter as a confusion of metaphors, he thundered: “Because that viper Theodore Watts has stabbed so many of us in the back anonymously in the _Athenæum_, he daren’t bring out his novel. He can never say anything bad enough about a ‘minor poet,’ as he scornfully calls us, but he knows that some of us do a little reviewing, and that we are waiting for him to publish his book that we may get a bit of our own back.”