I have often thought that the youth of a later generation can hardly realise the wealth of contemporary achievement that lay around those of us who chanced to be born in that fortunate hour. However great, or however greatly admired, may be the writers of a past day, they can never speak with the quickened magic that a living master can command. And what masters then stood there to win our worship! Tennyson in his prime, and Browning, whose unexhausted energy had yet to give to the world _The Ring and the Book_; Swinburne, whose new and intoxicating music came like a voice from an undiscovered land of song; and Morris, who in his _Defence of Guinevere_ had already found a key that was to unlock a long-unused storehouse of legend and romance. And then, a little later, Rossetti, mystic and passionate, whose brooding melodies seemed to mirror in verse those “painted poems” that were wrought by his brush; and in fiction, where Meredith had only lately arisen, there still stood Dickens and Thackeray, George Eliot and the Brontës; and in other fields of literature, Carlyle, Mill and Ruskin, Emerson and Froude. They were all our heroes then, and if Time has not left the place of all unshaken, enough remain to form such a goodly company as no later hour can boast. And this is so far acknowledged by the youth of a younger generation that I find those of quickest appreciation in poetry and fiction constantly tempted to steal my heroes and set them above their own. Already at school I had made acquaintance with the poems of Wordsworth, a strange choice for a boy; and the circumstances of his life, and the revolution which he partly headed, drew me quickly to others of the group until all lesser admiration was finally merged in my worship of Keats. It was only in later days that I brought myself to the study of the poets of the intermediate time between the Elizabethans and the close of the eighteenth century, and I will confess that even now I have no great zest for them. But turning aside for the moment from the things that already interested me most, I remember being vividly impressed by some events that occurred in the City during the period of my apprenticeship. The sudden transition from private school to the Stock Exchange presented points of interest that could not fail to attract a boy, even though his ambition was otherwise engaged. I was in the City in the year 1867, the year of the great financial crisis which is associated with the name of Overend Gurney. The streets and narrow lanes round about the Stock Exchange during that turbulent time presented many picturesque sights, and within the Stock Exchange itself were daily scenes of almost maddening excitement.