Nights: Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties

recall the faces, not even the names; some of the younger I remember better, partly I suppose because they were young and starting out

who had lived there for more years than he had hours, all about the churches and palaces and galleries, like a new Columbus revealing to his astonished audience the wonders of a New World. And it amused me to see how patiently the older men listened, sparing his illusions, no doubt because they heard in his ardent, confident, decidedly dictatorial voice the voice of their own youth calling. He carried his convictions home with him unspoiled, and his first building-a hospital or something of the kind-wa

went with him. He too was a discoverer, but his discovery was of Paris and the Latin Quarter. It had filled a year between Chicago, where he had been Oscar Wilde's discovery, and Rome, and he had had time to work off his first fantasti

model he had just heard of, and then he would drop into the Nazionale at night to report his want of progress, for no model ever came up to his standard. He referred to his own beauty with the frank simplicity and vanity of a child-a real Post-Impressionist; not one by pose, for there was not a trace of pose in him. I wish I could say how astonishing he was to me. Life has since thrown many young artists and writers my way and I am used to their

he evening he hurried to the café from his visit to the Coliseum by moonlight to tell us of his joke on the Americans he found waitin

Bier,' and of course the Americans took us for Germans. Then we hid in the shadows a little further on and we both yelled together at the top of our voices

of learning Italian. He was reading Wilkie Collins and Bret Harte in an Italian translation, and when he yawned in our faces and left the café early, it was because the night before the Dago's Woman in Whit

most models could not wait three months to be paid. To this conclusion he came soon after the first of the year and settled down seriously to posing for himself and, as the world knows, the Young Sophocles was finish

gh, which meant, according to his own reckoning, the most wonderful person on earth. He was one of the sort of men whose habit is to turn up wherever you may happen to be, in whatever part of the world, with no apparent reason for being there except to talk to you,-the last time we met

epended upon his patronage and balls languished without him, though I could never understand how or why, so rarely did he leave us to enjoy them. Every arch?ologist, every scholar, every historian in Rome appealed to him for help, and as for art, it was folly for others to pretend to speak of it in his presence. He called himself an artist and for a time he used to go with J. to Gigi's, the life school where artists then in Rome often went of an afternoon to draw from the model. But J. never saw him there with as much as a scrap of paper or a pencil in his hands, and nobody ever saw him at work anywhere. For what he did not do he made up by telling us of what he might do. His were the pictures unpainted which,

l us the most marvellous theosophical adventures, which he knew not by hearsay, but because he had passed through them himself. We might express an opinion: he stated facts. And it seemed that he had no more intimate friend than Sinnett, and that to Sinnett he had confessed his scepticism, asking for a sign, a manifestation, and that one afternoon when they were smoking over their coffee and cognac after lunch in Sinnett's chambers, then on the third floor of a house near the Oxford Street end of Bond Street-Forepaugh was carefully exact in his details-Sinnett smiled mysteriously but said nothing ex

ing better or bigger than anybody else. "Why, if I were to tell him I had an elephant in my back yard," my Uncle used to say,