favourite
place of refreshment was the Caledonian Coffee House in Covent Garden.
Here, for a few coppers, I could feast on coffee and muffins--muffins
saturated with butter, and worthy of the gods! Then, issuing forth,
full-fed, glowing, oleaginous, I would light my pipe, and wander out
into the lighted streets.

[Illustration: THE ENTRANCE HALL.]

Criticisms for the _Athenaeum_, then edited by Hepworth Dixon, brought me
ten-and-sixpence a column. I used to go to the old office in Wellington
Street and have my contributions measured off on the current number
with a foot-rule, by good old John Francis, the publisher. I wrote,
too, for the _Literary Gazette_, where the pay was less
princely--seven-and-sixpence a column, I think, but with all extracts
deducted! The _Gazette_ was then edited by John Morley, who came to the
office daily with a big dog. "I well remember the time when you, a boy,
came to me, a boy, in Catherine Street," wrote honest John to me years
afterwards. But the neighbourhood of Covent Garden had greater wonders!
Two or three times a week, walking, black bag in hand, from Charing
Cross Station to the office of _All the Year Round_ in Wellington
Street, came the good, the only Dickens! From that good Genie the poor
straggler from Fairyland got solid help and sympathy. Few can realise
now what Dickens was then to London. His humour filled its literature
like broad sunlight; the Gospel of Plum-pudding warmed every poor devil
in Bohemia.

At this time, I was (save the mark!) terribly in earnest, with a dogged
determination to bow down to no graven literary Idol, but to judge men
of all ranks on their personal merits. I never had much reverence for
Gods of any sort; if the Superior Persons could not win me by love, I
remained heretical. So it was a long time before I came close to any
living souls, and all that time I was working away at my poems. Then, a
little later, I used to go o' Sundays to the open house of Westland
Marston, which was then a great haunt of literary Bohemians. Here I
first met Dinah Muloch, the author of _John Halifax_, who took a great
fancy to me, used to carry me off to her little nest on Hampstead Heath,
and lend me all her books. At Hampstead, too, I foregathered with Sydney
Dobell, a strangely beautiful soul, with (what seemed to me then) very
effeminate manners. Dobell's mouth was ever full of very pretty
Latinity, for the most part Virgilian. He was fond of quoting, as an
e