Some eminent Victorians: Personal recollections in the world of art and letters

From my earliest boyhood I think my bent was towards a literary career, but it was long before my ambition could be put to the test. The seventh of a family of ten, it was scarc...

It might perhaps be supposed, from the brief account I have given of myself, that these earlier days were wholly devoted to study and hard work. This, however, was very far from...

An early friend of mine, Arthur O’Neil, the younger half-brother of Henry O’Neil, the painter of _Eastward Ho_, had somehow persuaded a modest capitalist to venture a small sum...

While this journalistic work was in its earliest stages, I was still seriously engaged in trying to fit myself for work at the Bar. My earlier knowledge of the Law had been gain...

I can hardly say what it was that gave to my early efforts in journalism a decided bent towards the study of Art; for although my first experiments, as I have already said, were...

My intimacy with Burne-Jones struck deeper and lasted without interruption from those earlier days of the “Ignotus” articles in the _Globe_ to the time of his death in 1898. We...

Millais was not one of those to whom I had written after the publication of my article upon his work, and it was not till later at the Arts Club that I learned to know him perso...

I think it was a criticism of Sidney Colvin’s in the _Pall Mall Gazette_ upon his picture called “The Plough” that first drew me to a closer study of Fred Walker’s work. Sidney...

It was inevitable that the new movement in Art, with its deeper research of truth in the rendering of human form and the facts of outward nature, should have led to a renewed st...

When, for reasons that need not now be discussed, Mr. Hallé and I severed our connection with the Grosvenor Gallery, we at once cast about to establish its successor. It was obv...

Apart from Burne-Jones, whose gathered works, the fruit of many years’ labour, naturally occupied the dominant place in the first exhibitions of the Grosvenor Gallery, there wer...

My connection with the Grosvenor Gallery was due, in the first instance, to a series of articles upon the reform of the Royal Academy published by me in the columns of the _Pall...

From a very early time the art of oratory attracted me strongly. I remember, as a boy, my father reading to us the full report in the _Times_ of Edwin James’s defence of Orsini;...

Among the great literary men of the time, Lord Tennyson was the first with whom I came into personal contact. When I was about seventeen I used to stay sometimes with Mrs. Camer...

During the ’seventies I got to know many of the younger men of letters whose fame had not yet completely asserted itself. My association with the _Saturday Review_ brought me in...

My association with the theatre began somewhat disastrously. It was my father’s kindly thought, while we were still children, to afford us an annual visit to the pantomime, a vi...

The recollection of many pleasant hours spent at the Lambs Club recalls other social gatherings which have lightened my life as a man of letters. Of society, strictly so called,...

As I have said in a previous chapter, H. J. Montague, at the time that I first became a theatre-goer, was the accepted _jeune premier_ of the time. He certainly had no rival amo...

In 1887 my friend Mr. Beerbohm Tree, who had already won considerable distinction as an actor, decided to enter upon the management of a London theatre, and he asked me to assoc...