Speaking for myself, I scarcely remember the time when I was not an eager student of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s writings. Like most boys born with the itch for writing, I began to spill ink on paper in my third lustre. The fermentation of the soul which drove me to write a dreadful elegy, modelled upon ‘Lycidas,’ on the death of an indulgent aunt, also drove me to welter in drowsy critical journals. By some humour of chance I stumbled upon the ‘Athenæum,’ and there I found week by week writing that made me tingle with the rapture of discovery. The personal magic of some unknown wizard led me into realms of gold and kingdoms of romance. I used to count the days till the ‘Athenæum’ appeared in my Irish home, and I spent my scanty pocket money in binding the piled numbers into ponderous tomes. Well I remember the advent of the old, white-bearded Ulster book-binder, bearing my precious volumes: even now I can smell the pungent odour of the damp paste and glue. In those days I was a solitary bookworm, living far from London, and I vainly tried to discover the name of the magician who was carrying me into so ‘many goodly states and kingdoms.’ With boyish audacity I wrote to the editor of the ‘Athenæum,’ begging him to disclose the secret; and I am sure my naïve appeal provoked a smile in Took’s Court. But although the editor was dumb, I exulted in the meagre apparition of my initials, ‘J. D.,’ under the solemn rubric, ‘To Correspondents.’ It was by collating certain signed sonnets and signed articles with the unsigned critical essays that I at last discovered the name of my hero, Theodore Watts. Of course, the sonnets set me sonneteering, and when my execrable imitation of ‘Australia’s Mother’ was printed in the ‘Belfast News-Letter’ I felt like Byron when he woke up and found himself famous. Afterwards, when I had plunged into the surf of literary London, I learnt that the writer who had turned my boyhood into a romantic paradise was well known in cultivated circles, but quite unknown outside them.