sm, when I arrived in London, was emigrating from the tavern of
sanded floors and clay pipes into Clubland. Artists, authors, actors,
and journalists were starting clubs of their own, simply to continue the
same pot-house life without restraint; in place of turning the
public-house into a club, they turned the club into a public-house. If
journalists in Grub Street were at their worst in those days, artists
were at their best. The great boom in trade which followed the
Franco-German War produced a wave of extraordinary prosperity, which
landed many a tramp struggling in troubled waters safely on the beach of
fortune. Working men in the North were drinking champagne; some of them
rose to be masters and millionaires. They tired of drinking champagne,
they could not play the pianos they had bought, or enjoy the mansions
they had built; but they could rival each other in covering their walls
with pictures, so the poorest "pot-boiler" found a ready sale. The most
indifferent daubs were sold as quickly as they could be framed. Artists
then built their mansions, drank champagne, and played on their grand
pianos. When I, still in my teens, first met these good fellows, I might
have been tempted, seeing what wretched work satisfied the
picture-dealer, to abandon black and white for colour; but already the
boom was over. Artists, like their patrons, had found out their mistake.
They had either to let or sell their costly houses, and have, with few
exceptions, little to show now for those wonderful days of prosperity in
the early seventies--which they still talk over in their clubs in
Bohemia.

[Illustration]

The few exceptions are the survival of the fittest. But the best of
artists have never seen such a boom in art as that I saw in my early
days in London. It cannot be denied that, from a fashionable point of
view, picture shows are going down. Artists have had to stand on one
side as popular Society favourites: the actors have taken their place.
One has only to visit the studios on "Show Sundays" to see what a
falling off there is. "Show Sunday" was, some years ago, one of the
events of the year. From Kensington to St. John's Wood, and up to
Hampstead, the studios of the mighty attracted hosts of fashionable
people to these annual gatherings.

A familiar figure at these for many years was the genial Sir Spencer
Wells, the well-known surgeon. He lived monarch of all he surveyed at
Golder's Hill, Hampstead, and many a mornin