m Court Brown,
Bond Brown--what names did we little brutes NOT cull for him from
the London Directory? Except how miserable we made his life, I do not
remember much about him as he was at that time, and the only important
part of the little else that I do recall is that already he showed
a strong sense for literature. For the majority of us Carthusians,
literature was bounded on the north by Whyte Melville, on the south by
Hawley Smart, on the east by the former, and on the west by the latter.
Little Brown used to read Harrison Ainsworth, Wilkie Collins, and other
writers whom we, had we assayed them, would have dismissed as 'deep.' It
has been said by Mr. Arthur Symons that 'all art is a mode of escape.'
The art of letters did not, however, enable Brown to escape so far from
us as he would have wished. In my third term he did not reappear among
us. His parents had in some sort atoned. Unimaginative though they
were, it seems they could understand a tale of woe laid before them
circumstantially, and had engaged a private tutor for their boy. Fifteen
years elapsed before I saw him again.

This was at the second night of some play. I was dramatic critic for the
Saturday Review, and, weary of meeting the same lot of people over and
over again at first nights, had recently sent a circular to the managers
asking that I might have seats for second nights instead. I found that
there existed as distinct and invariable a lot of second-nighters as of
first-nighters. The second-nighters were less 'showy'; but then, they
came rather to see than to be seen, and there was an air, that I liked,
of earnestness and hopefulness about them. I used to write a great deal
about the future of the British drama, and they, for their part, used
to think and talk a great deal about it. People who care about books
and pictures find much to interest and please them in the present. It
is only the students of the theatre who always fall back, or rather
forward, on the future. Though second-nighters do come to see, they
remain rather to hope and pray. I should have known anywhere, by the
visionary look in his eyes, that Brown was a confirmed second-nighter.

What surprises me is that I knew he was Brown. It is true that he
had not grown much in those fifteen years: his brow was still
disproportionate to his body, and he looked young to have become
'confirmed' in any habit. But it is also true that not once in the past
ten years, at any rate, had he f