my father had just
been brought into contact with the first stirrings of those radical
changes which revolutionised the London world of literature and
journalism during the last three decades of the nineteenth century.
The Board School had not quite arrived, but the social revolution was
at hand; and, there among the bracken in Richmond Park, my father with
his malacca cane was defying the tide--like my friend of the
camp-stool: Canute. Remembered phrases like: 'Underbred little clerk!';
'His place is the counting-house, and ---- [the editor] should have
known better than to leave us at the mercy of this impudent cad,'
convince me that my father's wrath was in great part directed less
against an individual than a social movement or tendency.

Much that my father said that afternoon would probably have a
ridiculous seeming in this twentieth century. Compulsory education and
the aesthetic movement, not to mention the Labour Party, Tory
Democrats, and the Halfpenny Press, were as yet undiscovered delights
when my father talked to me in Richmond Park. A young man of to-day,
reading or listening to such words, would almost certainly be misled
by them regarding the character and position of the speaker. My father
was no scion of a noble house, but the only son of a decayed merchant.
His attitude of mind and disposition, however, were naturally somewhat
aristocratic, I think. Also, as I have said, our talk was in the
'sixties. He was sensitive, very proud, inclined, perhaps, to
scornfulness, certainly to fastidiousness, and one who seldom suffered
fools either gladly or with much show of tolerance. It was a somewhat
unfortunate temperament, probably, for a man situated as he was,
possessed of no private means and dependent entirely upon his
earnings. In my mother, I believe he had married a lady of somewhat
higher social standing than his own, who never was reconciled to the
comparatively narrow and straitened circumstances of her brief
wifehood.

'The people who have to do with newspapers are the serfs and the
prostitutes of literature. It was not always so, but I've felt it
coming for some time now. It is the growing dominion of the City, of
commerce, of their boasted democracy. The People's Will! Disgusting
rubbish! How the deuce should these office-bred hucksters know what is
best? But, I tell you, my boy, that it is they who are becoming the
masters. There is no more room in journalism for a gentleman;
certainly not f