ults that the
full piteousness of him glares out.

Not my compassion, however, impels me to write of him. For his sake,
poor fellow, I should be inclined to keep my pen out of the ink. It is
ill to deride the dead. And how can I write about Enoch Soames without
making him ridiculous? Or rather, how am I to hush up the horrid fact
that he WAS ridiculous? I shall not be able to do that. Yet, sooner or
later, write about him I must. You will see, in due course, that I have
no option. And I may as well get the thing done now.

In the Summer Term of '93 a bolt from the blue flashed down on Oxford.
It drove deep, it hurtlingly embedded itself in the soil. Dons and
undergraduates stood around, rather pale, discussing nothing but it.
Whence came it, this meteorite? From Paris. Its name? Will Rothenstein.
Its aim? To do a series of twenty-four portraits in lithograph. These
were to be published from the Bodley Head, London. The matter was
urgent. Already the Warden of A, and the Master of B, and the Regius
Professor of C, had meekly 'sat.' Dignified and doddering old men, who
had never consented to sit to any one, could not withstand this dynamic
little stranger. He did not sue: he invited; he did not invite: he
commanded. He was twenty-one years old. He wore spectacles that flashed
more than any other pair ever seen. He was a wit. He was brimful of
ideas. He knew Whistler. He knew Edmond de Goncourt. He knew every one
in Paris. He knew them all by heart. He was Paris in Oxford. It was
whispered that, so soon as he had polished off his selection of dons,
he was going to include a few undergraduates. It was a proud day for me
when I--I--was included. I liked Rothenstein not less than I feared him;
and there arose between us a friendship that has grown ever warmer, and
been more and more valued by me, with every passing year.

At the end of Term he settled in--or rather, meteoritically
into--London. It was to him I owed my first knowledge of that forever
enchanting little world-in-itself, Chelsea, and my first acquaintance
with Walter Sickert and other august elders who dwelt there. It was
Rothenstein that took me to see, in Cambridge Street, Pimlico, a young
man whose drawings were already famous among the few--Aubrey Beardsley,
by name. With Rothenstein I paid my first visit to the Bodley Head.
By him I was inducted into another haunt of intellect and daring, the
domino room of the Cafe Royal.

There, on that October eveni