d he wrote
to me there, his decoration of my name on the envelope with the finest
ceremonial prefix of the ceremonious Spanish code which to him
represented the splendour of the land of Don Diego and Don Quixote.

It was this faculty of entering into the heart, the spirit of life and
all things in it that made him the inspiring companion and friend he
was, that widened his sympathies until he, whose intolerance was a
byword with his contemporaries, showed himself tolerant of everything
save sham and incompetence. The men who would tell you in their day, who
will tell you now, of the great debt they owe to Henley, are men of the
most varied interests, whose style and subject both might have been
expected to prove a great gulf to separate them. Ask Arthur Morrison
straight from the East End, or FitzMaurice Kelly fresh from Spain; ask
W.B. Blakie preoccupied with the modern development of the printed book,
or Wells adrift in a world of his own invention; ask Kipling steeped in
the real, or Barrie lost in the Kail-Yard; ask Kenneth Grahame on his
Olympian heights or George S. Street deep in his study of the prig--ask
any one of these men and a score besides what Henley's sympathy,
Henley's outstretched hand, meant to him, and some idea of the breadth
of his judgment and taste and helpfulness may be had. Why he could
condescend even to me when, in my brave ignorance, I undertook to write
that weekly column on Cookery for the _Pall-Mall_. He it was who gave me
Dumas's _Dictionnaire de la Cuisine_, the corner-stone of my collection
of cookery books--a fact in which I see so much of Henley that I feel as
if the stranger to him who to-day takes the volume down from my shelves
and reads on the fly-leaf the simple inscription, "To E.R.P. d.d.
W.E.H.," in his little crooked and crabbed writing, must see in it the
eloquent clue to his personality that it is to me.

III

I have said that Henley seldom came to us--as indeed he seldom went
anywhere or, for that matter, seldom stayed at home--without a
contingent of his Young Men in attendance. I do not believe I could ever
have gone to his rooms in Great College Street, or to his house at
Addiscombe, or in later, sadder days to the other, rather gloomy, house
on the riverside at Barnes,--turned into some sort of college the last
time I passed, with a long bare students' table in the downstairs
dining-room where I had been warmed and thrilled by so much exhilarating
talk,--that som