The recollection of many pleasant hours spent at the Lambs Club recalls other social gatherings which have lightened my life as a man of letters. Of society, strictly so called, I have known but little. A few occasional excursions into the higher realms have come to me accidentally, and my experiences of such more formal gatherings were never of a kind to tempt me to strive with any earnest ambition for those more dignified joys which must, I presume, be highly prized by those who seek them. The drift of modern life has, indeed, broken down many of the barriers of an earlier time, and the dividing line between Bohemia and Society, properly so called, is now often effaced by ambition on the one side or by curiosity on the other. Here, however, I shall only speak of those more intimate gatherings where artists of various callings were wont to meet, and the first in my recollection are those associated with the pleasant Sunday evenings at the house of Dr. Westland Marston, whose simple hospitality drew many interesting folk to his table. It was there I first met the beautiful Adelaide Neilson, whose picturesque and romantic career would vie in interest, if it could ever be recorded, with that of Lady Hamilton herself. Certainly her changing fortunes were no less sudden in their contrast, for, although she came of humble origin, she was at the time when I first knew her widely worshipped as a beauty and as an actress. Dr. Westland Marston himself had, like Rossetti, though not in an equal degree, the power of inspiring and encouraging younger men, whom he loved to draw about him. While I was still at school I had already read his play of _The Patrician’s Daughter_, a play chiefly interesting from a literary point of view by reason of its endeavour to treat a purely modern theme through the medium of blank verse. Some of his shorter poems were also known to me, and as he was the first man of any rank in literature with whom I had become personally acquainted, I was glad of the opportunity which those Sunday evenings afforded me to know him better. No man had ever a more real delight in literature or a clearer or more delicate perception of its finer qualities. I think it was Joseph Knight who first introduced me to him, and in the years when I was making my first efforts in journalism it was a constant delight to me to find that I was a welcome visitor at his house. He had been impressed, as Knight told me, by a review I had written in the _Globe_ of the poems of Joachim Miller, and I remember the warm words of encouragement with which he greeted me on my first visit to his house.