Two of the young men who forgathered at "The Crown" in 1892 have passed on for keeps--Lionel Johnson, the author of "The Art of Thomas Hardy," and the personal statement to me that he knew every inch of Wales; and Ernest Dowson, a man who lived in a queer, rambling old storehouse on the docks--a possession of his own, and who knew much about London that he should have been allowed to tell. The gatherings in the back parlor were comparatively innocent little intentions upon life and literature. I got good out of them in a number of ways, and might have benefited by them more had my intentions been more distinctly literary. What Swinburne, Pater, Wilde, Verlaine and others were doing and saying was not half so interesting to me as what some haphazard pick-up might say to me and Symons, during our stroll after the Crown meeting was over. On one occasion, however, an Irish journalist, who was present, succeeded in getting me patriotically indignant. He had spent the afternoon in Westminster Abbey, happening, among other things, upon Longfellow's bust. "I can't see," he said, at the end of his account of his afternoon, unmistakably referring to the Longfellow bust, "why the Americans can't bury their dead at home." It was on the tip of my tongue to ask him why the Irish couldn't keep their alive at home, when some one said: "Soda, please," and the difficulty was both watered and bridged over. I suppose that "The Crown" meetings were mutual admiration parties of a kind, but of an innocent kind. I recall a callow youth (who had squandered his patrimony in Paris), with a slender volume of reminiscent verse, button-holing me and saying: "Really, you know ---- (a member of the company) is a genius. His command over vocables is something stupendous." Blank has since made a name for himself, but I remember looking at him at the time, innocently wondering whether he was a genius, and, if so, what vocables were. But in spite of the ready assistance offered to all hands to think well of themselves, the gatherings usually netted one something worth while in the end, either in criticism or incident. They call to mind now a series of gatherings held a number of years later in New York among a collection of American writers. And this thinking of the two combinations reminds me of what George Augustus Sala once said to me in Rome. I had gone to him, according to agreement, to ask him what he had to say to a young man, anxious to do well in journalism, about writing in general. He was sitting at breakfast when I dropped in at his hotel, very much surrounded by macaroni and the local newspapers. "And what are your pleasures?" Sala began without warning, as if I had gone to him for medical advice. I was so upset by this beginning of things that, for the life of me, I could not think for a second or two what my pleasures were. I finally managed to say that I enjoyed whist.