Poverty makes a man acquainted with strange bedfellows; and I made one or two queer acquaintances on the Thames Embankment and acquired a taste for vagabondising about among the poor which lasted a year or two and has proved to be of no small service since. Slumming had not become a fashion at that time of day; but I have never aimed at being in the fashion, and I did a good deal of it. Through Archibald Forbes's kind offices, I found an introduction to the _World_ journal, and, at Edmund Yates's instigation, wrote a series of articles therein under the title of 'Our Civilisation,' picking up all the quaint and picturesque odds and ends of humanity I could find in London. I met many people whom it was very difficult to describe and impossible to caricature. Amongst them was a street artist who lived in Gee's Court, off Oxford Street--a worthless, drunken, and pretentious scoundrel, who seriously believed himself to be the most neglected man of genius in London. I employed him to repeat what he called his _chief de hover_ on cardboard, and paid him half a crown for it. He called this work 'The Guard Ship Attacked.' It represented a Dead Sea of Reckitt's Blue with two impossible ships wedged tightly into it, each broadside on to the spectator. From the port-holes of each issued little streaks of vermilion, and puffs of smoke like pills. The artist gloated over this work, and was ready to resent criticism of it like another Pietro Vanucci. He told me he was unappreciated; that he was a man of the supremest talent, and was kept out of the great theatres, where he could have shone as a scene-painter, by nothing but the pettiest and shabbiest jealousies. I don't know where he had picked up the phrase, but he had something to say about the dissipation of the grey matter of the brain, and he returned to it fondly as long as I would allow him to talk to me. His artistic labours and his art invention were dissipating the grey matter of _his_ brain. All he asked for was a fair field and no favour. If I would give him three pound ten he could buy an easel, a canvas, and a set of painting tools, and would at once proceed to show the Royal Academy what was what I was well to do by this time, but yet not quite wealthy enough to venture on such an experiment. The most amusing thing this vagabond said was when he found in my room the painting materials and sketches of an artistic friend of mine with whom I was chumming at the time. His nose wrinkled with an infinite disdain as he turned the sketches over, and he said, with a delightful air of patronage, 'I see, I see. A brother of the brush.' He brought with him on his journey from Gee's Court to the north of London an incredible ghoul of a man, a creature whose face was muffled in a huge beard alive with vermin. He, it seemed, was another neglected man of genius; but I declined to be introduced to him. I looked up the artist's address, however, and got to know his neighbourhood pretty well.