In good company

“I can understand your dislike of professionalism--in advertisement, Mr. Wilde,” he said bluntly. “And, since you have condescended to stoop to quote Dickens, I may add that, in...

“Come again soon, dear fellow. Come again soon,” he said, as he held my hand in a long clasp. And when I had passed out of his sight and he out of mine, his voice followed me pa...

I have written at greater length than I intended, in hinting and in hoping that Wilde was at times under the subjection of powers and forces of darkness outside himself. I say “...

I was under the impression, before receiving Mr. Clodd’s very interesting letter, and from what Grant Allen told me of the rebuff, that it was the latter’s question about the Ma...

“I very much dislike having attributed to me a prayer which I did not write. It is not, as you know, that I do not believe in prayer. I have humbly asked God’s help and guidance...

I agree with Groome that that was the only way out of the difficulty. Left to himself, I doubt whether Watts-Dunton would ever have permitted even _Aylwin_, ready for publicatio...

No, apart from the question whether this story (I tell it as it was told me long ago) be true or not true, I do not claim for S. J. Stone that he was a saint. To some men the co...

Swinburne’s remarks upon the subject of my article--though I need hardly say I have forgotten no word of what he said--I pass over, but what I must not pass over is the witness...

He loved the name of “Catholic,” and resented the somewhat arrogant claim to a monopoly in that beautiful word by the Church of Rome, and if one of his own congregation used it...

This was not the view taken by Swinburne and Watts-Dunton. It so happened that I encountered the latter in the Strand a morning or two later, and more in sadness than in anger h...

Whymper, as I have said, never or rarely talked shop, but he did talk--though never egotistically--of himself. He told me that he came of a Suffolk family, but could trace his d...

The last tour closed only a week or two before the outbreak of war, and Lord Roberts, who followed our progress with the keenest interest, sent us on several occasions by letter...

And so, having discharged his missile, Wilde, no longer lolling indolently forward in his seat, pulled himself backwards, and up like a gunner taking a pace to the rear, or to t...

One sometimes hears or sees it stated that Watts-Dunton was indifferent alike to literary fame and to criticism, adverse or favourable. No one who knew him other than very sligh...

New and incoming tides of poetry lapped at his feet each morning, and the incoming of each new tide of poetry was to him as fresh, pure, crystalline-sweet, and free, as is the t...

It is many years since we first met at the house of one whom we both loved, whose memory we both cherish. It was that friend’s hope that you and I should become, and should rema...

“I see that you mention Mr. William Watson as a friend of yours,” he wrote to me. “---- who was here the other day, greatly vexed and even distressed me by telling me that Mr. W...

“Now you can hardly call that a characteristic or even a particularly interesting letter,” continued Whymper, “but the writing appears to have given the poet some trouble, for t...

Some time before Stone’s death I had been much thrown into the company of a gifted and brilliant thinker and man of Science, who had very little belief--I will not say in the ex...