something exotic, foreign in the good looks that I put
down to New Zealand, for I suppose New Zealand as well as America has
produced a type--not quite so truculent in talk as in print, more
inclined to fight with a smile. A third was Wilfred Pollock, forgotten
save by his friends I am afraid; and a fourth, Vernon Blackburn, who
began life as a monk at Fort Augustus and finished it as a musical
critic, he too I fear scarcely more than a name; and a fifth, Jack
Stuart, and a sixth, Harold Parsons, and a seventh, and an eighth, and I
can hardly now say how many more long since dead, now for me vague
ghosts from out that old past so overflowing with life.

When William Waldorf Astor bought the _Pall Mall Gazette_ and started
the weekly _Pall Mall Budget_ and the monthly _Pall Mall Magazine_, he
presented Henley with two or three new Young Men and added to our
company on Thursday nights, little as he had either of these
achievements in view. His plunge into newspaper proprietorship was one
of the newspaper ventures that counted for most in the Nineties. It was
a venture inclining to amateurism in detail, but run on business, not
romantic, lines and therefore it was less talked about than those
purely amateur plunges into journalism which gave the Nineties so much
of their picturesqueness. But all the same, we saw revolution in it, the
possibility of wholesale regeneration, the inauguration of a new era,
when "sham" would be exposed, and "Bleat" silenced, and art grow "Human"
once more. In the _Budget_ and the _Magazine_ it was likewise to be
proved that America and France were not alone in understanding and
valuing the art of illustration:--vain hopes!

Henley and his Young Men rejoiced in a new sphere for fighting, certain
of a brilliant victory, since they were to have a share in the command.
Astor, with a fine fling for independence--his only one in public--or
else with that old gentlemanly dream of a newspaper "written by
gentlemen for gentlemen," had captured his editors in regions where
editors are not usually hunted--Henry Cust, heir to a title, for the
_Gazette_, Lord Frederick Hamilton, his title already inherited, for the
_Magazine_. Fleet Street shrugged its shoulders, laughed a little, not
believing title and rank to have the same value in journalism as in
society. Cust, to do him justice, agreed with Fleet Street, and, knowing
that he was without experience, had the sense to appeal for help to
those with it.