When I had been in London a decade, I stood aside from myself and reviewed my situation with the god-like and detached impartiality of a trained artistic observer. And what I saw was a young man who pre-eminently knew his way about, and who was apt to be rather too complacent over this fact; a young man with some brilliance but far more shrewdness; a young man with a highly developed faculty for making a little go a long way; a young man who was accustomed to be listened to when he thought fit to speak, and who was decidedly more inclined to settle questions than to raise them. This young man had invaded the town as a clerk at twenty-five shillings a week, paying six shillings a week for a bed-sitting room, threepence for his breakfast, and sixpence for his vegetarian dinner. The curtain falls on the prologue. Ten years elapse. The curtain rises on the figure of an editor, novelist, dramatist, critic, connoisseur of all arts. See him in his suburban residence, with its poplar-shaded garden, its bicycle-house at the extremity thereof, and its horizon composed of the District Railway Line. See the study, lined with two thousand books, garnished with photogravures, and furnished with a writing-bureau and a chair and nothing else. See the drawing-room with its artistic wall-paper, its Kelmscotts, its water-colours of a pallid but indubitable distinction, its grand piano on which are a Wagnerian score and Bach's Two-part Inventions. See the bachelor's bedroom, so austere and precise, wherein Boswell's "Johnson" and Baudelaire's "Fleurs du Mal" exist peaceably together on the night-table. The entire machine speaks with one voice, and it tells you that there are no flies on that young man, that young man never gives the wrong change. He is in the movement, he is correct; but at the same time he is not so simple as not to smile with contemptuous toleration at all movements and all correctness. He knows. He is a complete guide to art and life. His innocent foible is never to be at a loss, and never to be carried away--save now and then, because an occasional ecstasy is good for the soul. His knowledge of the _coulisses_ of the various arts is wonderful. He numbers painters, sculptors, musicians, architects, among his intimate friends; and no artistic manifestation can possibly occur that he is unable within twenty-four hours to assess at its true value. He is terrible against _cabotins_, no matter where he finds them, and this seems to be his hobby: to expose _cabotins_.