re, Frank eagerly button-holed Mike,
and asked him why he had not been to dine at Lubini's, and not
suspecting that he dined there only when he was in funds, was
surprised at his evasive answers. Mistress and lover were equally
anxious to know why they had not been able to find him in any of the
usual haunts; he urged a press of work, but it transpired he was
harassed by creditors, and was looking out for rooms. Frank told
him he was thinking of moving into the Temple.

"Lucky fellow! I wish I could afford to live there."

"I wish you could.... The apartment I have in mind is too large for
me, you might take the half of it."

Mike knew where his comforts lay, and he accepted his friend's offer.
There they founded, and there they edited, the _Pilgrim_, a weekly
sixpenny paper devoted to young men, their doings, their amusements,
their literature, and their art. Under their dual editorship this
journal had prospered; it now circulated five thousand a week, and
published twelve pages of advertisements. Frank, whose bent was
hospitality, was therefore able to entertain his friends as it
pleased him, and his rooms were daily and nightly filled with
revelling lords, comic vocalists, and chorus girls. Mike often craved
for other amusements and other society. Temple Gardens was but one
page in the book of life, and every page in that book was equally
interesting to him. He desired all amusements, to know all things, to
be loved by every one; and longing for new sensations of life, he
often escaped to the Cock tavern for a quiet dinner with some young
barristers, and a quiet smoke afterwards with them in their rooms. It
was there he had met John Norton.

The _Pilgrim_ was composed of sixteen columns of paragraphs in which
society, art, and letters were dealt with--the form of expression
preferred being the most exaggerated. Indeed, the formula of
criticism that Mike and Frank, guided by Harding, had developed, was
to consider as worthless all that the world held in estimation, and
to laud as best all that world had agreed to discard. John Norton's
views regarding Latin literature had been adopted, and Virgil was
declared to be the great old bore of antiquity, and some three or
four quite unknown names, gathered amid the Fathers, were upon
occasion trailed in triumph with adjectives of praise.

What painter of Madonnas does the world agree to consider as the
greatest? Raphael--Raphael was therefore decried as being scarcely