ase he
certainly did, what we held in secret reverence, he never failed to
associate it with things or persons that did not move us to reverence.
Once I found him just returned from some art congress in Liverpool or in
Manchester. "The salvation armyism of art," he called it, and gave a
grotesque description of some city councillor he had found admiring
Turner. Henley, who hated all that Ruskin praised, thereupon derided
Turner, and finding the city councillor the next day on the other side of
the gallery, admiring some Pre-Raphaelite there, derided that
Pre-Raphaelite. The third day Henley discovered the poor man on a chair in
the middle of the room staring disconsolately upon the floor. He terrified
us also and certainly I did not dare, and I think none of us dared, to
speak our admiration for book or picture he condemned, but he made us feel
always our importance, and no man among us could do good work, or show the
promise of it, and lack his praise. I can remember meeting of a Sunday
night Charles Whibley, Kenneth Grahame, author of _The Golden Age_, Barry
Pain, now a well-known novelist, R. A. M. Stevenson, art critic and a
famous talker, George Wyndham, later on a cabinet minister and Irish chief
secretary, and now or later Oscar Wilde, who was some ten years older than
the rest of us. But faces and names are vague to me and while faces that
I met but once may rise clearly before me, a face met on many a Sunday has
perhaps vanished. Kipling came sometimes, I think, but I never met him;
and Stepniak, the Nihilist, whom I knew well elsewhere but not there,
said--"I cannot go more than once a year, it is too exhausting." Henley
got the best out of us all, because he had made us accept him as our judge
and we knew that his judgment could neither sleep, nor be softened, nor
changed, nor turned aside. When I think of him, the antithesis that is the
foundation of human nature being ever in my sight, I see his crippled legs
as though he were some Vulcan perpetually forging swords for other men to
use; and certainly I always thought of C----, a fine classical scholar, a
pale and seemingly gentle man, as our chief swordsman and bravo. When
Henley founded his weekly newspaper, first _The Scots_, afterwards _The
National Observer_, this young man wrote articles and reviews notorious
for savage wit; and years afterwards when _The National Observer_ was
dead, Henley dying, and our cavern of outlaws empty, I met him in Paris
very