protested week by week against mediocrity in
paint, settled down to keeping the mediocre paintings against which his
protests were loudest. He who thundered against the degeneracy of
journalism accepted the patronage of the titled promoter of the
half-penny press. Architects carried their respectability to the
professional chair it adorns, and illustrators rested in the comfortable
berths provided by _Punch_. Friendships cooled, and friends who never
missed a Thursday look the other way when they meet us in the street.

Close to me, as I write, is a bookcase on whose shelves Henley and
Henley's Young Men--Marriott Watson, George Steevens, Charles Whibley,
Leonard Whibley, Rudyard Kipling, Kenneth Grahame, Arthur Morrison, G.S.
Street--jostle each other in the big and little volumes that were to
create the world anew. The small green-bound Henleys stand in a row.
_Salome_, _The Rape of the Lock_, _Volpone_, with Beardsley's
illustrations, are flanked by the more pretentious performances of the
Kelmscott Press and the Vale Press and the other Presses aspiring with
much advertisement to do what the Constables of Edinburgh did so much
better as a matter of course, and, as a reminder of this truth, the
_Montaigne_ of the _Tudor Series_ is there and the _Apuleius_ and the
_Heliodorus_, each with its inscription. And the little slim volume,
neatly bound by Zaehnsdorf, called _Allahakbarries_--now a prize for
the collector I am told--immortalizes one recreation at least of
Henley's Young Men. For it is Barrie's report of the Cricket Team
largely made up of these Young Men, of whom he was Captain and who used
to play at Shere on the never-to-be-forgotten summer days when beautiful
Graham Tomson and I were graciously invited as Patronesses, and little
Madge Henley--her death shortly afterwards proving Henley's own death
blow--figured as "Captain's Girl" and the _National Observer_ office as
"Practice Ground." And if Henley did not drag himself down with us to
the pretty Surrey village, he seemed to preside over us all, so much so
that when J. and I had the little book bound and added the photographs
Harold Frederic--"Photographer" in the report--made of the Team, we
included one of Henley, and altogether the tiny volume is as eloquent a
document of the Nineties and of Henley and Henley's Young Men as we
have, and I wonder what the collector of those snares for the American
now catalogued by the bookseller as "Association Books" w