They disliked me at sight, and I them, and we did not dissemble!
Like Barty, I am fond of men's society; but at least I like them to be unmistakably men of my own sex, manly men, and clean; not little misshapen troglodytes with foul minds and perverted passions, or self‑advertising little mountebanks with enlarged and diseased vanities; creatures who would stand in a pillory sooner than not be stared at or talked about at all.
Whatever their genius might be, it almost made me sick—it almost made me kick, to see the humorous and masculine Barty prostrate in admiration before these inspired epicenes, these gifted epileptoids, these anæmic little self‑satisfied nincompoops, whose proper place, it seemed to me, was either Earlswood, or Colney Hatch, or Broadmoor. That is, if their madness was genuine, which I doubt. He and I had many a quarrel about them, till he found them out and cut them for good and all—a great relief to me; for one got a bad name by being friends with such nondescripts.
"Dis‑moi qui tu hantes, je te dirai ce que tu es!"
Need I say they all died long ago, without leaving the ghost of a name?—and nobody cared. Poetical justice again! How encouraging it is to think there are no such people now, and that the breed has been thoroughly stamped out![1]
Barty never succeeded as an illustrator on wood. He got into a way of doing very slight sketches of pretty people in fancy dress and coloring them lightly, and sold them at a shop in the Strand, now no more. Then he made up little stories, which he illustrated himself, something like the picture‑books of the later Caldecott, and I found him a publisher, and he was soon able to put aside a few pounds and pay his debts.