FORES’S COMIC ENVELOPES No. 1
My friend Augustus Egg, R.A., who lived in a charming house in Queen’s Road, Bayswater, was not only well known as an excellent artist, but also as being the Amphitryon whose hospitality was famous, and whose dinners were still more famous by reason of the guests who were wont to surround his table. Where is the hungry man who would not have been enchanted to meet Dickens and Leech, Mark Lemon and John Forster (Dickens’s biographer), Hawkins, Q.C. (now the judge), Landseer, Mulready, Webster, and other artists less famous? Of these dinners I shall have something to say by-and-by; at present I confine myself to one special occasion.
It was on one day during the year 1847 that Egg said to me:
“You know Mulready better than I do; I wish you would go and get him to fix a day to dine here—any day next week will suit me. Leech wants to meet him; and, somehow or other, though both have dined here frequently, they have never met.”
“Good,” said I; “I will do your bidding.”
And on the following Sunday I called upon Mulready.