I find by reference to some notes jotted down at the time that the last I saw of him was the evening of the 21st of December, 1866. He had dined with my wife and myself, and, accompanied by Arthur Sketchley, who had dropped in after dinner, he bade us good-by and went for his nightly grind, as he called it. We were booked to take our departure the next morning. His condition was pitiable. He was too feeble to walk alone, and was continually struggling to breathe freely. His surgeon had forbidden the use of wine or liquor of any sort. Instead he drank quantities of water, eating little and taking no exercise at all. Nevertheless, he stuck to his lecture and contrived to keep up appearances before the crowds that flocked to hear him, and even in London his critical state of health was not suspected. Early in September, when I had parted from him to go to Paris, I left him methodically and industriously arranging for his début. He had brought some letters, mainly to newspaper people, and was already making progress toward what might be called the interior circles of the press, which are so essential to the success of a newcomer in London. Charles Reade and Andrew Haliday became zealous friends. It was to the latter that he owed his introduction to the Savage Club. Here he soon made himself at home. His manners, even his voice, were half English, albeit he possessed a most engaging disposition--a ready tact and keen discernment, very un-English,--and these won him an efficient corps of claquers and backers throughout the newspapers and periodicals of the metropolis. Thus his success was assured from the first. The raw November evening when he opened at Egyptian Hall the room was crowded with an audience of literary men and women, great and small, from Swinburne and Edmund Yates to the trumpeters and reporters of the morning papers. The next day most of these contained glowing accounts. The Times was silent, but four days later The Thunderer, seeing how the wind blew, came out with a column of eulogy, and from this onward, each evening proved a kind of ovation. Seats were engaged for a week in advance. Up and down Piccadilly, from St. James Church to St. James Street, carriages bearing the first arms in the kingdom were parked night after night; and the evening of the 21st of December, six weeks after, there was no falling off. The success was complete. As to an American, London had never seen the like.