It

from Dickens that he drew the knowledge which enabled him to conduct the magazine of Temple Bar first, and his own newspaper of the World afterwards, with such substantial success. may also be mentioned that the late Grenville Murray, associated with Yates at the beginning of his journal, and the writer of the second feuilleton published in its columns, had himself been a pupil of Dickens on the staff of Household Words; thus, in the case of three men who have left their mark upon the journalism of the time-Yates, Murray, and G. A. Sala—the genius of Charles Dickens was a primarily formative power with each. Throughout his life Edmund Yates was ever learning; his receptive power was as great, his perceptions were as keen, in middle age as in youth. The World, under his management, treated political questions seriously, discussed them closely, espoused or condemned measures and men on public grounds with sustained ability; but whatever may have been from time to time the pen employed to fulfil these functions, their controller was the editor himself; others may have lit the fuse which fired the gun, but the cannon was always pointed by himself. In regard to power and quickness of editorial initiative, apprehension as to the final drifts of popular feeling in political not less than in social matters, Edmund Yates may claim a place beside some of the great conductors of journalistic enterprise during the present century-Douglas Cook, John Thaddeus Delane, to mention two comparatively recent names with which most of us are familiar. To the son of him who sang the "Song of the Shirt," the late Tom Hood-a name which the present writer mentions with the deepest regard and affection, as that of his earliest friend in literary London-the author of these lines was indebted for his first introduction to Edmund Yates, then in the Post Office, but also editing Mr. Bentley's magazine, somewhere in the later 'sixties. The literary London of Pendennis, of Albert Smith, of the Broughs, was then passing away; the younger Hood had gathered around him on the staff of Fun, and of his own "Annual," many bright and fresh. wielders of the pen and pencil, who have since, long ere this, arrived at some distinction or joined the majority. There were T. W. Robertson, who, having fought long, and only with spasmodic success, for recognition as a writer of pungent humour, biting sarcasm, stinging repartee, was about, a few years later, to conquer th theatrical world with the play of "Society" and its succeeding dramas,

from his chosen ground of the little playhouse near to Tottenham Court Road; there, too, assembled at the Saturday dinner of the Savage Club, then held at a tavern in Maiden Lane, gathered around Hood, were W. J. Prowse, rich in dainty, delicate, and satiric. fancies, suitable equally for prose or verse; H. S. Leigh, not much, if at all, below the level of Locker as an author of Prædesque rhymes; W. S. Gilbert, who had not then even produced "Dr. Dulcamara" at the St. James's Theatre, and who did not, perhaps, anticipate that the day was drawing near when he would "hurl his barristerial wig to limbo," and describe to laughter-convulsed audiences how a certain high official came to be "the ruler of the Queen's navee." There, too, somewhat out of place, as it might be thought, in a company of which the dominant complexion was comic, was a man who had already, on the staff of the Daily Telegraph, taken a foremost place in the ranks of London journalism, the late James Macdonel, fresh, perhaps, from consultation, on high publicistic matters, with the late Thornton Hunt, his colleague in the councils of the Peterborough Court, one of the shrewdest and ablest of newspaper men who ever trod the flagstones of Fleet Street. Silent and thoughtful as the late James Macdonel-trained by Alexander Russel on the Scotsman-was, he yet, at the Savage Club dinners, would sometimes crack patriotic jokes with his brother Aberdonian-also a member of that coterie-Andrew Halliday, then a chief writer for Dickens's journal, but hereafter to become the successful playwright of Drury Lane. The Savage Club still exists, but it flourishes now as a fashionable haunt, where successful generals esteem it a compliment to be asked to dine, and where royal princes are pleased to lounge and smoke while they listen to elegant extracts from entertainments given by popular favourites. This is, perhaps, symbolical of the social change which has come over literary London long since Edmund Yates first knew it. Between five-and-twenty and thirty years ago, if not exactly the Bohemia of Henri de Murger, still a very fair substitute for it had a distinct place upon the map of London; its limits soon began to contract, and now, perhaps, in these days of universal clubdom and evening dress for everybody, it seems entirely to have vanished out of the metropolitan chart. About this time it may have been that the Bohemia of Cockaigne was somewhat clumsily lampooned by an anonymous writer in the then existent London Review; nor did the region possibly ever quite recover its former jubilant and

But though

vigorous tone after the attack thus made upon it. Edmund Yates knew of this aspect of London literary life, and, as one whose business it was to see everything, made casual excursions into it, he was never an inhabitant of it; his early domestication, the rare comfort and happiness of his home life, his shrewd perception that much frequenting of haunts like those of the "fly-by nights" in his own novel and Tom Robertson's play was not conducive to solid success in professional literature, ever caused him, not needlessly or on light provocation, to curtail his repose. In the absence of any documentary evidence, the social retrospect, which has here seemed opportune, suggests to the present writer that, with the exception of his friend Mr. Clement Scott, he is probably the sole survivor of this company. George Rose (Arthur Sketchley), whom nature surely cast for the part of Falstaff; Paul Gray, most delicate of draughtsmen, with a taste as keen and refined as his beautifully-chiselled features; William Brunton, the humorous illustrator of children's books; Thomas Morten, who never seemed to do entire justice to an appreciation of the beautiful, and to creative powers which ought to have won for him a high and enduring place in British art; Thomas Archer, one of the earliest discoverers and describers of that East-End life which the efforts of his latter-day imitators and the caprices of popular taste have rendered fashionable; Godfrey Turner, blameless in all the relations of his existence and the model of a good all-round journalist: these have all passed away, and, from personal knowledge of them, live perhaps only in the memories of W. Beatty Kingston and a few others.

Well-known to some of this company, and contemporary at that period of his career with Edmund Yates, was the late James Hannay, whose personal relations, in their common profession of journalism, with the subject of this sketch have been the topic of so much talk in literary circles, have attracted so much of even wider interest, and have been misrepresented so extensively, that it may not be amiss briefly to tell the simple truth about them here. As a journalist resident in London before he returned to his native Scotland for the purpose of editing the Edinburgh Courant; as a man of letters whose reading was wide, and whose pen, alternately graceful and incisive, never laboured without effect, and was welcome in every quarter of English periodical literature, James Hannay was a noticeable man. Sailor by early profession, high Tory by inborn prejudice, wide

and considerable, if rather superficial, scholar by his own industry and taste, he had his foibles as well as his fortes, his hobbies, fads, his argot, and his crotchets, which he often ventilated in such a way as to challenge contradiction. He was surrounded also by a select band of social or convivial, as well as literary, henchmen, whom he ruled like the historic despot of the "Mermaid Tavern," and to whom his watchword was interpreted as being the exaltation of Thackeray over Dickens, less on grounds of higher literary merit than of superior birth and breeding. Even among Hannay's personal intimates and admirers there were some who occasionally wearied of a dogmatism, often carried to the verge of the grotesque, on all matters connected with the literature of the classics, or with that of Dugdale and Debrett. It was a friend of Hannay's as well as of Yates's, the late Robert Brough, who, piqued by the perpetual reiteration of the pretentious trisyllable, burst out into some lines beginning—

"There's a curse in the phrase, deny it who can ;

There's a curse in the phrase, 'I'm a gentleman.'"

It was another staunch supporter and crony of this highly cultured and genially aggresive Scot-himself an Oxford scholar of standing, and publicist of repute-who, stung into retort, exclaimed at last to his amiable but rather overbearing friend, "There are those who might say of James Hannay that he was a gentleman without an estate, and a scholar without a degree." Here, it may be supposed, were all the elements. of a hostile collision between the scion of Caledonia and the son of the English actor and actress; but, as a matter of fact, the contretemps, when it did occur, was only in the mildest form, and then it was not provoked by Edmund Yates. At this time a rumour in London was afloat that James Hannay was about to be summoned from Scotland to undertake the editorship of the newly-founded journal, whose proprietors had christened it from the pages of the Pendennis, which they themselves had published. Yates was then writing "The Flaneur," a column of weekly gossip in the defunct Morning Star, and referring to the report in playfully mock heroic vein, on the plea that only the Muse could do justice to the coming event, turned off these lively lines, which, as garbled versions of them have been given repeatedly, may as well, perhaps, correctly be quoted here. They hit off happily the characteristic slang of the school pointed at :

He would be a purist, to use the mildest term, who, in the language elicited by this little episode, would affect to see anything discreditable to either of the men concerned; and here the incident closed. It is very likely that after this, during Hannay's stay in London, before he went as Consul to Barcelona, where he died, the two men may never have met, or, if they did, only upon semi-public occasions.

The novels of Edmund Yates were popular at once on publicationwhether as magazine serials or otherwise-in England, and immediately too made their mark on the other side of the Atlantic. The general method of his fictions was to select a strongly defined feminine character from some grade of life he knew well, and to group round her incidents and personages, as the evolution of his characters or the unfolding of his plot required. His intrinsic merits as a novelist are shown sufficiently by the fact that so consummate a judge of this kind of composition as Charles Dickens published at least one of Yates's serials in his magazine. These fictions show great uniformity of sustained merit, abound in descriptions of men, manners, and places which have a real historical value, and are studded with happy antitheses, or the smart and good things, of which the following, quoted from memory, may serve as a specimen: "To pay a tradesman, to whom a long account is owing, a five-pound note, is like giving a wet brush to a very old hat, it creates a temporary gleam of comfort, but no more." About the nature of the success of Edmund Yates's visit to America as a