s round, mellifluous
speech of the old Greeks; David Gray, great-eyed and beautiful, like
Shelley's ghost; Lord Houghton, with his warm worldly smile and
easy-fitting enthusiasm. Where are they all now? Where are the roses of
last summer, the snows of yester year? I passed by the Priory to-day,
and it looked like a great lonely Tomb. In those days, the house where I
live now was not built; all up here Hampstead-ways was grass and fields.
It was over these fields that Herbert Spencer and George Eliot used to
walk on their way to Hampstead Heath. The Sibyl has gone, but the great
Philosopher still remains, to brighten the sunshine. It was not my luck
to know him _then_--would it had been!--but he is my friend and
neighbour in these latter days, and, thanks to him, I still get glimpses
of the manners of the old gods.

With the publication of my first two books, I was fairly launched, I may
say, on the stormy waters of literature. When the _Athenaeum_ told its
readers that 'this was _poetry_, and of a noble kind,' and when Lewes
vowed in the _Fortnightly Review_ that even if I 'never wrote another
line, my place among the pastoral poets would be undisputed,' I suppose
I felt happy enough--far more happy than any praise could make me now.
Poor little pigmy in a cockle-boat, I thought Creation was ringing with
my name! I think I must have seemed rather conceited and 'bounceable,'
for I have a vivid remembrance of a _Fortnightly_ dinner at the Star and
Garter, Richmond, when Anthony Trollope, angry with me for expressing a
doubt about the poetical greatness of Horace, wanted to fling a decanter
at my head! It was about this time that an omniscient publisher, after
an interview with me, exclaimed (the circumstance is historical), 'I
don't like that young man; he talked to me as if he was God Almighty, or
_Lord Byron_!' But in sober truth, I never had the sort of conceit with
which men credited me; I merely lacked gullibility, and saw, at the
first glance, the whole unmistakable humbug and insincerity of the
Literary Life. I think still that, as a rule, the profession of letters
narrows the sympathy and warps the intelligence. When I saw the
importance which a great man or woman could attach to a piece of
perfunctory criticism, when I saw the care with which this Eminent
Person 'humoured his reputation,' and the anxiety with which that
Eminent Person concealed his true character, I found my young illusions
very rapidly fading. O