There is nothing more to be said about Chapman’s. I left after an offer of partnership, which, it is needless to say, I did not accept. Mr. Whitbread obtained for me a clerkship in the Registrar-General’s office, Somerset House. I was there two or three years, and was then transferred to the Admiralty. Meanwhile I had married. The greater part of my life has been passed in what it is now usual to contemn as the Victorian age. Whatever may be the justice of the scorn poured out upon it by the superior persons of the present generation, this Victorian age was distinguished by an enthusiasm which can only be compared to a religious revival. _Maud_ was read at six in the morning as I walked along Holborn; _Pippa Passes_ late at night in my dark little room in Serle Street, although of course it was a long while after the poem made its appearance. Wonderful! What did I see as I stood at my desk in my Serle Street bedroom? “Day! Faster and more fast, O’er night’s brim, day boils at last; Boils, pure gold, o’er the cloud-cup’s brim Where spurting and suppresst it lay—” There on the horizon lies the cloud cup. Over the brim boils, pure gold, the day! The day which is before me is Pippa’s day, and not a day in the Strand: it is a “twelve-hours treasure”: I am as eager as Pippa “not to squander a wavelet of thee”. The vision still lives. The friend who stood by my side is still with me, although he died years and years ago. What was true of me was true of half a score of my friends. If it is true that the Victorian time was ugly and vulgar, it was the time of the _Virginians_, of _David Copperfield_, of Tennyson’s _Poems_, of Cromwell’s _Letters and Speeches_, of the _Letters and Life of Lord Bacon_, of Emerson’s _Essays_, of _Festus_, of the _Dramatis Personæ_, and of the _Apologia_. We were at the Academy at eight o’clock on a May morning to see, at the very earliest moment, the Ophelia, the Order for Release, the Claudio and Isabella, Seddon’s Jerusalem, Lewis’s Arab Scribe and his Frank Encampment in the Desert. The last two, though, I think, were in the exhibition of the Old Water Colour Society. The excitement of those years between 1848 and 1890 was, as I have said, something like that of a religious revival, but it was reasonable. These notes are not written for publication, but to please two or three persons related to me by affection.