and Mrs.
Harland, Beardsley, Max Beerbohm and two or three others whose faces
have grown dim in my memory, everybody as unwilling to break up the
meeting as on Thursday nights in our Buckingham Street rooms. And with
these ceremonies the _Yellow Book_ was launched into life.

I am not sure what the _Yellow Book_ means to others--to those others
who buy it now in the thirteen volumes of the new edition and prize it
as a strange record of a strange period, from which they feel as far
removed as we felt from the Sixties. But to me, the bright yellow-bound
volumes mean youth, gay, irresponsible, credulous, hopeful youth, and
Thursday night at Buckingham Street in full swing. To be sure the
_Yellow Book_ was never so young as it was planned to be. It did not
represent only _les Jeunes_, who would have kept it all to themselves in
their first mad, exuberant, reckless springtime. But they were not
strong enough to stand alone, as _les Jeunes_ seldom are, or have been
through the ages. It was more original in its art than in its
literature. Some of the youngest writers were "discoveries" of Henley's,
while some who actually were "discovered" by the _Yellow Book_ have
faded out of sight. Many were men of name and fame well established.
Hamerton, almost at the end of his career, Henry James in the full
splendour of his maturity, Edmund Gosse with his reputation already
assured, were as welcome as the youngest of the young men and women who
had never printed a line before. So identified with "this passage of
literary history"--in his words--was Henry James that he has recorded
the preliminary visit of "a young friend [Harland of course], a
Kensington neighbour and an ardent man of letters," with "a young friend
of his own," in whom there is no mistaking Beardsley, "to bespeak my
interest for a periodical about to take birth in his hands, on the most
original 'lines' and with the happiest omen." But there was youth in
this readiness for hero-worship--youth in this tribute to the older men
whose years could not dim the brilliance nor lessen the power of their
work in the eyes of the new generation--the fragrance of youth exudes
from the pages of the _Yellow Book_ as I turn them over again, in
places the fragrance of infancy, the young contributors so young as to
seem scarcely out of their swaddling clothes. At the time the energy and
zest put into it had an equal savour of youth. And altogether it gave us
all a great deal to talk ab