"Temperance?" I asked.
"No, not one. Happy thought!—of course that is where they'll be."
"Try them all," I said, as I waved my hand. And off the cab rushed to visit the various temperance hotels in London.
The next day I returned to Hastings, and went straight to Mr. Toole's hotel. Getting the hall porter into my confidence, he sent up a message to Mr. Toole that a gentleman with a large family had arrived to see him; and the porter and I made the noise of ten up the stairs, and eventually the gentleman and family were announced at Toole's door. I shall never forget poor Toole, standing in an attitude so familiar to the British public, with his eye-glass in his hand and his eyes cast on the ground—he was afraid to raise them. As soon as he did, however, his other hand caught the first book that was handy, and it was flung at my head.
Bohemianism, when I arrived in London, was emigrating from the tavern of sanded floors and clay pipes into Clubland. Artists, authors, actors, and journalists were starting clubs of their own, simply to continue the same pot-house life without restraint; in place of turning the public-house into a club, they turned the club into a public-house. If journalists in Grub Street were at their worst in those days, artists were at their best. The great boom in trade which followed the Franco-German War produced a wave of extraordinary prosperity, which landed many a tramp struggling in troubled waters safely on the beach of fortune. Working men in the North were drinking champagne; some of them rose to be masters and millionaires. They tired of drinking champagne, they could not play the pianos they had bought, or enjoy the mansions they had built; but they could rival each other in covering their walls with pictures, so the poorest "pot-boiler" found a ready sale. The most indifferent daubs were sold as quickly as they could be framed. Artists then built their mansions, drank champagne, and played
on their grand pianos. When I, still in my teens, first met these good fellows, I might have been tempted, seeing what wretched work satisfied the picture-dealer, to abandon black and white for colour; but already the boom was over. Artists, like their patrons, had found out their mistake. They had either to let or sell their costly houses, and have, with few exceptions, little to show now for those wonderful days of prosperity in the early seventies—which they still talk over in their clubs in Bohemia.
The few exceptions are the survival of the fittest. But the best of artists have never seen such a boom in art as that I saw in my early days in London. It cannot be denied that, from a fashionable point of view, picture shows are going down. Artists have had to stand on one side as popular Society favourites: the actors have taken their place. One has only to visit the studios on "Show Sundays" to see what a falling off there is. "Show Sunday" was, some years ago, one of the events of the year. From Kensington to St. John's Wood, and up to Hampstead, the studios of the mighty attracted hosts of fashionable people to these annual gatherings.
A familiar figure at these for many years was the genial Sir Spencer Wells, the well-known surgeon. He lived monarch of all he surveyed at Golder's Hill, Hampstead, and many a morning I met him when riding, and we jogged into town together. He was a capital raconteur, a happy wit, and told one incident I always recall to mind as I pass a house on the top of Fitzjohn's Avenue, where a few years ago lived, painted and "received" that Wilson Barrett of the brush, Edwin Long, R.A., a hard-working, self-made artist who amassed a fortune by successfully gauging the taste of the large middle-class English public in mixing religion with voluptuous melodrama. On the annual "Show Sunday" no