authorized life, but the world still waits. Cope Cornford
attempted a sketch, but scarcely the shadow of Henley emerges from its
pages. Because he thundered and denounced and condemned and slashed to
pieces in the _National Observer_, his contemporaries imagined that
Henley did nothing anywhere at any time save thunder and denounce and
condemn and slash to pieces and that he was altogether a fierce,
choleric, intolerant, impossible sort of a person. The chances are few
now realize that Henley was enough of an influence in his generation for
it to have mattered to anybody what manner of man he was. A glimpse of
him remains here and there. Stevenson has left the description of his
personality, so strong that he was felt in a room before he was seen.
His vigour and his manliness, survive in his work, but cannot quite
explain the commanding power he was in his generation, while neither he
nor his friends have shewn, as it should be shewn, the other side to his
character, the gay, the kindly side, so that I feel almost as if I owed
it to his memory to put on record my impressions of my first meeting
with him, since it was only this side he then gave me the chance to see.

I wonder sometimes why I had never met Henley before. When J. and I came
to London he was editing the _Magazine of Art_, a little later he
managed the _Art Journal_, and in both he published a number of J.'s
drawings, and we had letters from him. We went to houses where he often
visited. I remember hearing him announced once at the Robinsons' in
Earl's Terrace, but Miss Mary Robinson, as she was then--Madame Duclaux
as she is now--left everybody in the drawing-room while she went to see
him downstairs, because of his lameness she said, but partly, I
fancied, because she wanted to keep him to herself to discuss a new
series of articles. She had just "come out" in literature and was as
fluttered by her every new appearance in print as most girls are by
theirs in a ball-room. In other houses, more than once I just missed
him, I had never got nearer than business correspondence when he left
London to edit the _Scots Observer_ in Edinburgh, and he stayed there
until the _Scots_ became the _National Observer_ with its offices in
London.

I had heard more than enough about him in the meanwhile. The man who
says what he believes to be the truth--the man who sits in, and talks
from, the chair of the scorners--is bound to get himself hated, and
Henley came in for h