CHAPTER XII

LITERARY CLUBS: MY CONNECTION WITH THE AUTHORS’ CLUB

WHEN we came back from the United States in 1891, besides our wide American circle, most of whom were in the habit of frequently visiting England in the season, we soon found ourselves in the heart of a Bohemian society, which met almost daily at one or other club or reception. Receptions had become the order of the day among London literary people, artists and actors. The epidemic came over from America at the same time as the habit of personal journalising. Certain popular newspapers devoted columns and columns every week to giving every species of good-natured gossip about the biographies and home-lives of well-known people. It was this movement which culminated in the production of _Who’s Who_. Interviewing was a feature of the day. From living like hermit-crabs, English authors suddenly began to realise the value of publicity in the sale of their wares.

They had always in a decorous Victorian way met at the Athenæum Club, but that did not open its doors at all. The pleasant Garrick and the Savile had an almost equal dread of literary burglars. The National Club had only a select few authors who liked its fleshpots. But their younger rivals saw in receptions a fresh element of interest to attract and benefit members. The Arts Club, the newly founded Authors’ Club, the Hogarth, the Savage, the Vagabonds, and the Playgoers, to all of which I had been elected, were free and fearless in their hospitalities, and here, and through friends I met in these clubs, I acquired the friendship of many of the world’s workers.

The Arts Club in those days was a jolly place; charming and distinguished men could be found dining there almost every night, and after dinner you played pool with the Royal Academicians, or talked scandal about the way that artists were elected, and pictures selected, to the Royal Academy. These were most enjoyable evenings.

At the Hogarth, not far off, the artists who were not in the Academy or in the Academy set, used to assemble. It is the artist’s habit to work till daylight is gone, and then to waste his time in conversation or the billiard-room. The talk, when it was not shop, was all what they call in theatrical circles “gag.” Some of their shop was quite interesting, because it ran upon new men and new methods. I liked the latter best. Artists, unlike authors, are generally more ready to detract than to praise. They wish to mount over the bodies of the slain; they do not hold out a hand to those who are lower down the hill. But they were very kind to each other with money, though they were so unkind to each other’s work, and none of them seemed to stay at home to read after they had done their work.

The Authors’ Club had been established recently enough for me to come in as an original member. The Vagabonds Club, which had been in existence for a good many years, had not yet expanded into the New Vagabonds Club, nor had the White Friars organised banquets. The old Playgoers had a good many literary members, chiefly dramatists or would-be’s. The Arts, the happy hunting-ground of famous artists, had a few; the Hogarth, the favourite meeting-place for less favourite artists, had a few more; the Savage, in spite of its traditions, and the Garrick not many more; and the editors of the _Idler_ were in the habit of giving teas, which practically constituted a tea club without a subscription. I never was at the Yorick.

The Authors’ Club at that time took the lead in receptions. Sir Walter Besant, who founded it, made it his mission in life to bring authors together, both for the enjoyment of each other’s company, and for the defence of their common interests. For these purposes he originated both the Authors’ Club and the Authors’ Society, which had, in 1891, the same secretary, and himself for chairman of both, but which were technically unconnected.

The Authors’ Club owed its success, and especially the success of its meetings, to Oswald Crawfurd, not less than to Besant himself. Crawfurd had written a book or two, but he had no eminence in literature, beyond having put enough money into Chapman & Hall to become chairman of the company and editor of its review, the _Fortnightly_. But Crawfurd was rich, and at Eton, and as a Consul-General, he had won the friendship of half the well-known people in London. He used his influence, his energy and his money, prodigally, in making the new Club go. He entertained possible members both at the Club, and in his own home and at favourite restaurants; he wrote an enormous number of persuasive letters; he kept the thing going generally. The Club was his protégé as much as Besant’s.

Besant, with whom I had been in correspondence before I went to America, at the moment that he recruited me for the Club, was interested in introducing American methods at its meetings, and as I had just returned from America, the directors made me honorary secretary for this purpose.

I spent three years in America, and during that time enjoyed the hospitality of all the leading literary and Bohemian Clubs in New York, Boston and Washington. Washington, as far as I remember, had only one of any importance, but Boston and New York were rich in them, and I brought over ideas from them.

I explained to Besant what seemed to me the best features of American literary gatherings, and he evolved from them a programme for our weekly dinners at the Authors’ Club; but he thought that reading a paper, followed by a discussion, or entertaining a great author, whose health was proposed and who had to make a reply, was more suited to an English audience than telling anecdotes. I think he was right; telling anecdotes is not an English art. The American expects boundless patience from his audience while he elaborates the gist of the story; the longer he prolongs the agony, the better his audience likes it. He has made a fine art of story-telling, and does it well enough to take the place of a curtain-raiser at a theatre. The Englishman only does it in private—generally to the distress of his family—or introduces it incidentally into one of his speeches. Except barristers, and politicians, and clergymen, most Englishmen are afraid of the sound of their own voices in public, though Englishwomen often do not suffer from this disability. There is really some justification for the story of the man who was asked to give a definition of _woman_. He began, “Woman is, generally speaking....” “Stop there!” said his friend. “If you went on for a thousand years you would never get so near it again.”

Englishwomen as a class are much better speakers than Englishmen.

We got along comfortably at the Authors’ Club with entertaining eminent persons, and expecting them to speak in recognition of the compliment, until Sir Augustus Harris was asked to propose the health of Isidore di Lara, whose opera he had just presented at Drury Lane. Harris made a long speech, in which he told us all that he had done for grand opera, how much money he had spent, what singers, male and female he had discovered and the rest of it, and was very pleased with himself, and after about half-an-hour sat down without making the slightest allusion to di Lara. Oswald Crawfurd, I think it was, who noticed the omission, and, springing to his feet, proposed the toast.

After this it was felt that we ought to do something to strengthen the programme, and Besant proposed a form of entertainment which had come up in the United States since I had lived there. A man with the eminent name of Luther had hit upon an idea for giving authors a fourth profit on their works, and making them all contributors to his own profit. He called it “Uncut Leaves.” Under this name he offered all the most eminent authors in America a generous price if they would read their productions in a lecture hall before they were published serially, so that they received money for recitation as well as for serial rights, book rights and dramatic rights. I believe it went very well in America for a while, but in London it was impossible to persuade a Meredith or a Hardy to listen to such a proposal. To start with, only a funny man had a chance of getting an English audience to listen to him reading his own productions.

Later on we did try the anecdotes with some success at informal dinners.

In any case the Authors’ Club dinners and entertainments became a great success. It was the most popular literary institution of the day, both at its temporary first home in Park Place, and afterwards at its proper house in Whitehall Court. Some of the most eminent men were its guests. Among them, besides great authors, were great prelates, great generals, great admirals, great politicians, who enjoyed being entertained by the Authors’ Club better than at public banquets, because they only had to speak to fifty or a hundred men instead of addressing huge assemblies, and the formal part of the proceedings lasted such a short time that they might chat afterwards in the smoking-room or the billiard-room with their hosts, who always had among them men whose books they had been admiring for years. While Besant lived he was a great inspiration, and when he died his place was taken by others who had sprung to the forefront of literature in the interval.

The Authors’ Club differed from the original Vagabonds Club because only the Speaker or Speakers of the evening spoke, and the dinner was a more luxurious one. Most of the literary Vagabonds went to the Authors’ Club too, but at the Authors’ you met a fair sprinkling of the older authors like Sir Walter Besant, and, occasionally, Thomas Hardy. The gatherings were much larger. The Club contained many more members, and the bringing of guests was much more usual. Besant and Oswald Crawfurd brought a great many, generally distinguished men.

If the names of everyone present at some of those dinners were published now, people would be astonished to see what a high percentage of them have become household words.

Among them were John Hay, the greatest man the United States ever sent us as an Ambassador; the old Lord Chancellor; the old Lord Chief Justice; Lord Avebury, who invented the “bank-holidays” known as “St. Lubbock’s-days”; Lord Strathcona, the father of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and the synonym for patriotic munificence in these latter days; Lord Wolseley, then Commander-in-Chief; Sir Ian Hamilton, who won the important battles of Wagon Hill and the Diamond Hills in the South African war; Sir Edward Seymour, the great Admiral, who won as much reputation by daring to be a failure on his march from Tientsin to Peking as he did by all his successes; Admiral Sir William Kennedy, the wittiest speaker in the navy; Admiral Sir Hedworth Lambton, now Sir Hedworth Meux; and Admiral Sir Percy Scott, who saved the situation in the South African war by converting his 4·7 ship guns into field guns to meet the Boers’ “long Toms”; Bishop Creighton, and Bishop Ingram, of London; Bishop Gore, then of Worcester; Sir Robert Ball, the astronomer; Sir Leslie Stephen, the father of _The Dictionary of National Biography_; Sir Alma Tadema; Sir George Otto Trevelyan, Macaulay’s nephew, who wrote two of the greatest biographies in the language, _The Life of Macaulay_ and _The Life of Fox_, and has sons who rival him; Sir William Ramsey, F.R.S.; two famous brothers, the late Rt. Hon. Alfred Lyttleton, the greatest of all the giants of sport on record except C. B. Fry (who made the same impression on Parliament as he had made on his Eton schoolfellows by his loftiness of character), and his brother Edward, almost equally great in cricket, the head master of Eton; with authors like Rudyard Kipling, Ian Maclaren, Doyle, Barrie, Anthony Hope, Augustine Birrell, and Henry Arthur Jones. There are others equally eminent, if I could only remember them.

The greatest favourite we ever had among our guests at the Authors’ Club was “Ballahooley”—Robert Jasper Martin of Cromartin, better known as Bob Martin—a magnificent-looking Irish squire of the Charles Lever type, who bubbled over with natural wit.

Bob Martin was a brother of Violet Martin of Ross, and cousin of Edith Œnone Somerville the lady M.F.H., who collaborated in _Some Reminiscences of an Irish R.M_. and other famous books of Irish life and character, and though he did not write much, he had the same limitless fund of humour.

The first time that ever I took him to the Authors’ Club the late Lord Wolseley was the guest of the evening, and an admirable guest of the evening he was—illustrious, interesting, urbane, a brilliant talker. He and Martin were old friends, and after Lord Wolseley’s health had been proposed and he had responded in a speech which told us all about his literary work—like Moltke, he was an author by instinct—Martin got up to tell us some of his inimitable Irish stories. The first was one about Lord Wolseley himself. In the days when he was only a colonel, a sergeant-major came to him for a day’s leave to help his wife in doing the Company’s washing.

“I’ve been speaking to your wife, Pat,” said Colonel Wolseley, “and she begged me, whenever you came to me for leave on her washing-day, to refuse you because you get in her way so.”

The man saluted, and turned to leave the room, but when he got to the door he turned round and saluted again, and asked, “Have I your leave to say something, Colonel?”

“Yes, Pat.”

“Well, what I wish to say, sir, is that one of us two must be handling the truth rather carelessly, because I haven’t got a wife.”

True or untrue, Lord Wolseley did not deny the impeachment.

That same night “Ballahooley” told us of his first experience of the Castle at Dublin. He was asked to stay there the first time he ever came to town, and he was not used to town ways. When his jaunting-car pulled up at the door of the Castle, he told the footman to give the coachman a drink, which was the custom of the country at Cromartin. The footman stared at him.

“Didn’t you hear what I said?” he asked.

“Yes, sir, I heard,” said the footman slowly, and disappeared to fetch the drink because Martin swore at him so. When he came back, he brought a liqueur-glass of Benedictine on an immense silver tray. The coachman took the glass and smelt it—doubtfully.

“It’s all right, Pat, it was made by the Holy Fathers.”

Thus encouraged, Pat drank it off. He made a wry face.

“Don’t you like it, Pat? It’s very good.”

“Oh, it’s good enough,” said the Jehu, “but what I’m thinking is that the man who blew that glass was mighty short of breath.”

That same evening he told us of the first election to a District Council which was ever held on his estates. The place was a hotbed of Nationalism, and Bob Martin was very anxious to have a friend of his, who was a Conservative, elected on to the Council. So he assembled all his tenants, and said to them, “I wish you’d elect this man. I’ve never asked you to do anything for me before, and I’ve made more money out of one rotten song (‘Ballahooley’) than out of the whole blessed lot of you ever since I came in for this place.”

Their Irish minds were so struck by this piece of special pleading that they returned his candidate unopposed.

Bishop Creighton was a very entertaining guest. Just because he was so great and so potent as an administrator, he could be perfectly natural when he was dining with a couple of score of authors. One could not imagine the present Bishop—whom I remember in the days when he was at Keble—he was a very plucky player at football, which he had learned at Marlborough—blurting out like his predecessor that the first thing he asked about a parson who was recommended for a living in his gift was “Is he a hustler?” Nor can one imagine him fencing with the late Father Stanton of St. Alban’s, Holborn, over the use of incense.

I wish I had not forgotten the name of that club to which he and Balfour and I forget what others of the greatest in the land, a dozen or twenty in all, mostly great politicians or prelates, belonged, who dined together at the Grand Hotel once or twice a month, and quietly enjoyed themselves like the _Dilettanti_. I suppose that it exists still.

Bishop Gore was delightfully human the night that we entertained him at the Authors’ Club. He said that he felt quite shy of replying to the toast of his health—that generally, when he was speaking, he was addressing an audience upon subjects on which he was entitled to speak with authority, and upon which his audience were very anxious to hear what he had to say, but that on this occasion he was going to talk about a subject which interested no one, meaning himself, and he was quite at a loss what to say.

Sir Evelyn Wood, one of the few men who have ever won the V.C. both as a sailor and a soldier—he was a midshipman before he was a soldier, and made a famous ride with dispatches—and he has been called to the Bar since—supplemented his speech in reply to the toast with a selection of rattling anecdotes.

Sir Ian Hamilton, the General who saved Ladysmith by his victory at Wagon Hill, described the touch and go of his battle, which saved Ladysmith, in the slang of ordinary conversation, which made it extraordinarily impressive. It was very appropriate, too, for slang was the language of the brief council of war which Sir Ian held with the Colonel of the Devons before they launched the charge which saved the day.

One of the most interesting dinners we ever had was the dinner we gave to Zola in the Whitehall Rooms. We had other guests, varying from Stepniak, the Nihilist, to Frank Stockton and Bill Nye, the American humorists. Stockton told one of his characteristic American after-dinner stories of the “lady or the tiger” sort. Nye was really wonderful. He said that he himself belonged to an old French family—that the Nye family used always to spell their name Ney, but they changed it because one of the family was unfortunate. This allusion to the bravest of the brave brought the house down, but it took about a quarter of an hour to explain it to Zola.

Henry Arthur Jones was extraordinarily interesting—Jones, if you catch him in the right mood, can make a really fine speech, full of imagination.

One man whom I first met at the Authors’ Club, and whom I afterwards got to know better, though I have not seen him for many years—Lucien Wolf, had an extremely original way of working. Besides his ordinary press work, once a month he contributed a presentation of the foreign politics of the world to one of the principal Reviews. As foreign editor of a daily paper, he had the subject at his fingers’ ends, but it troubled him in a subject so full of tangled threads to break off his work for meals and to go to bed. Writing that article took about forty-eight hours, and during that time he hardly left his study; he did not go to bed at all; like the Admiral who gave them their name, he had sandwiches brought to him where he sat. He apparently felt no ill-effects from this tremendous effort of will-power and industry, though, of course, he looked very tired. His articles on foreign affairs in the monthly Reviews took the premier place.

Poulteney Bigelow was a character at the Authors’ Club in those days. The son of an American Ambassador—minister, as they were then called—he was, for some reason or another, an intimate personal friend of the German Emperor, with whom he constantly stayed, and of whom he treasured many anecdotes. He once nearly persuaded the Emperor to dine at the Authors’ Club. He disappeared for a while, and went out West in the United States again, from which he came back very full of the shooting exploits of Theodore Roosevelt, another of his friends.

Bigelow always maintained that the Spanish-American war was the best thing which ever happened for the relations between Great Britain and the United States. He said that the garrison, who died like flies in the Philippines, were mostly drawn from the South-Western States, where the hatred of England had been liveliest, and their colonial experiences made them understand how considerate the English were to subject peoples, and how very inconsiderate subject peoples were apt to be to their rulers.

We had quite a bevy of leading editors among our members, some of whom put in an appearance pretty constantly, but it never was a very active editor’s club; I think they were too afraid of would-be contributors.

William Sinclair, the Archdeacon of London, who was the principal figure at London functions for nearly a generation, was a pillar of the Club. He was a constant attendant at its house dinners, and apart from his influence and position, was a brilliant raconteur. Sometimes, like a true Scotsman, he told a story against himself, as when he told us why he was such a popular preacher at the Guards’ chapel—because the men said that he was the only person who ever preached to them with a voice like a sergeant-major.

Sinclair had met everybody of any importance in his time. He had one beautiful story of a Scotsman who suddenly became a Cabinet Minister on four or five thousand a year, and sported a butler. Sinclair, who was staying with him, in all innocence asked what the man’s name was, and his hostess said, “I don’t know; we always call him waiter.”

After Besant’s death, the two men who were most prominent at the Authors’ Club were certainly Conan Doyle and Anthony Hope—Doyle especially, because he was for a long time chairman of the Club, and a frequent attendant at the dinners. I wish I could remember only a tithe of the interesting and amusing things he said at that dinner-table, for Doyle always says something memorable in his speeches. But once I was so interested that I kept a note of what he said written down on my menu card. It was about his famous pamphlet—_The War; its Causes and its Conduct_. He told his audience that it came to him in an instant, like all great things in life, which hit on the head like a bullet. He was reading some peculiarly diabolical misrepresentations by the German editors. “Yet these men,” he told himself, “were, in the ordinary affairs of life, honest men. Many books have been written from our standpoint; but, in the first place, a German editor cannot buy a book which costs six shillings or more, and in the second place, he has not got time to read through it. The only thing is to give him free of cost something which he can read in an hour. My materials were all to hand. I know how humane Tommy Atkins was to his enemies, and I had been flooded with letters on the subject in reply to an advertisement I had inserted in the newspapers. Half-a-dozen things which have occurred to me in my life must have been foreordained.

“At a small dinner that night I sat next to ——. I explained my project to him. ‘How will you get the money?’ he asked. ‘From the public.’ ‘Well, I’ll get a thousand pounds for you.’

“Chance had thrown me against the man who knew everything I wanted to know. He could even tell me the names of the people who could translate it into the various languages. Five months later I had the book on my table in twenty languages. Rich men gave their fifty pounds to the scheme, poor people scraped together their half-crowns to do their widow’s-mites’ worth for England. I sent that pamphlet to every man in Europe whose opinion counted. Leyds gave me the cue. It is astonishing how few people govern the public opinion of the world. In two countries an honest second edition was called for—Hungary and Portugal. In the latter, our old ally, there was a most kindly feeling for us, a genuine anxiety to learn the true facts of the case. In Germany the whole twenty thousand copies were distributed; twelve thousand of them gratis, and eight sold. The Swiss actually printed an edition for themselves.”

He told us this on the night that we entertained him and Gilbert Parker in honour of their knighthood, and he told us how that morning a letter of congratulation from his gunsmith had arrived, addressed to “Sir Sherlock Holmes.” The best thing he ever told us about _Sherlock Holmes_ was its fate when he made a play of it, and sold it to a famous actor. The actor stipulated that he should be allowed to alter it as much as he liked, and when Doyle went to the rehearsals, he found that there was practically nothing of his play left except the title. That was all the actor really wanted to buy; he had made his own play out of the Sherlock Holmes stories before he went to Doyle.

It was at an Authors’ Club dinner that Hall Caine made his awful disclosure about Londoners’ insides. He said that no family could live in London for more than three generations unless its members went away for a change of air, and that the smoke-charged state of the atmosphere turned their insides from a healthy red to a slaty black. It was that same night that he recited his poem “Ellan Vannin” to us.

I remember, in the early days of the Authors’ Club, J. M. Barrie telling the Club a story in the American story-teller’s fashion. I don’t suppose for an instant that it had actually happened. I expect it was just a _ben trovato_, but it was none the less amusing. He apologised for being late. He had been to the wrong club. He had never been to the Authors’ Club before, he said (though he was a member of the committee), so he asked a policeman the way. From the way in which he pronounced the word, the policeman thought he meant Arthur’s, which was quite near the Authors’ Club when it was in its temporary premises in Park Place. When he got there he found it a very grand place, he said. The club porter looked him up and down, and said “The servants’ entrance is round the corner.”

It took the moral courage of a Scotsman to tell that story—true or untrue. It was inimitably funny, told in the broad Doric of _The Little Minister_.

Jerome actually had an experience of this sort in New York. But it was not due to the obtuseness of the club porter. He received a straight-out invitation from the servants of one of the great New York clubs to spend the evening with them. I suppose they have their story-tellers’ nights like the members. He said that he never enjoyed himself more in his life.[3]

Footnote 3:

The Authors’ Club, before it was reconstructed, contained a number of very representative members. Among them were Sir Walter Besant, Conan Doyle, Frankfort Moore, Hall Caine, Lindsay Bashford, R. D. Blumenfeld, F. T. Bullen, W. L. Courtney, S. R. Crockett, Sir Michael Foster, secretary of the Royal Society, J. Foster Fraser, Sydney Grundy, Charles Garvice, F. H. Gribble, H. A. Gwynne, the editor of the _Morning Post_, Major Arthur Griffiths, Rider Haggard, Cutcliffe Hyne, Anthony Hope, Clive Holland, Joseph Hocking, E. W. Hornung, Sir Henry Irving, J. K. Jerome, Henry Arthur Jones, Edward Jenks, who wrote that famous book _Ginx’s Baby_, and was once M.P. for Hull, Rudyard Kipling, Otto Kyllman, Archdeacon Sinclair, Norman McColl, editor of the _Athenæum_, Prof. Meiklejohn, father of the V.C. who was killed in putting a horse that could not jump at some railings in the Park to avoid running over a child; A. W. Marchmont, Bertram Mitford, J. Eveleigh Nash, Gilbert Parker, Barry Pain, J. M. Barrie, Max Pemberton, Sir J. Rennell Rodd, British Ambassador at Rome, Morley Roberts, Algernon Rose, who reconstituted the club, Bram Stoker, M. H. Spielmann, Prof. Skeat, the great etymologist, H. R. Tedder, the librarian of the _Athenæum_, Herbert Trench, Horace Annesley Vachell, W. H. Wilkins, Percy White, Lacon Watson, Horace Wyndham, and others.

But the Club could never rise much above three hundred members. Many a time have G. Herbert Thring, the secretary, and I discussed with our board, consisting from time to time of Besant, Oswald Crawfurd, Lord Monkswell, Tedder, the literary executor of Herbert Spencer, Conan Doyle, Anthony Hope, Hall Caine, Frankfort Moore, Morley Roberts, and Percy White, projects for bringing in more members. The change from the temporary premises in Park Place behind St. James’ Street, to the pleasant rooms overlooking the river, did something for us. But we were faced by a dilemma, which was that we had to widen the basis of our membership to get enough members to pay the huge rent of the premises, which we had taken for a term of years. If, instead of having these premises, we had hired a reading-room, and a smoking-room, and a dining-room in a hotel, we could have got the accommodation for a hundred a year, and as only a tithe of the Club ever used it, except on the nights when they were brought together by notice for the Club dinners, any premises would have been large enough; the hotel would always have lent us a room of any size which we could fill for a dinner. The Whitefriars principle would have suited us admirably, and the Hotel Cecil would have made a good venue. But we had these premises on our hands, and we wanted a larger membership, not to fill them, but to make financial arrangements easier. I myself in my time enlisted no fewer than a hundred members for the Club. But that did not fill up the wastage.

Thring saw the need of widening our basis as clearly as I did, but we never could carry our board with us to make an enlargement of the franchise sufficiently drastic, because they wished to be guided by the feeling of the men who used the Club most, and their feeling was decidedly against it—mainly, I believe, because they thought that the extra members we wanted to relieve the finances would make the Club too full to be restful. So in one way and another the old Club was drifting on to the rocks when Algernon Rose (with Charles Garvice as his chairman, and Cato Worsfold as honorary solicitor) took the matter in hand as honorary secretary. I did not see the throes. I was out of England on one of my wander-years.

Rose, with a clear-sighted policy, boundless energy and self-sacrifice, and inexhaustible tact, not only pulled the Club out of the fire, but has made it one of the most flourishing organisations in London, with two hundred town members, three hundred suburban members, five hundred country members, and six hundred oversea members. He could easily have a thousand town members if he wanted them, but the town membership is strictly limited to two hundred, and the suburban to three hundred, because that is the limit of habitués which the premises can accommodate. Unfortunately you can’t have five-day members at an Authors’ Club like you do at a Golf Club.

And nowadays members use the Club in a way they never did when I was the honorary secretary and we exhausted our ingenuity in efforts to make the club more inhabited through the week. The increase of attendance at the Monday night dinners is one of the most wonderful things of all. Week after week they have enormous dinners, and Rose provides a brilliant succession of famous guests of the evening. The other Tuesday I read a report of an Authors’ Club dinner in the _Daily Telegraph_ which filled three columns.[4]

Footnote 4:

Among the guests of the evening at the Authors’ Club since Rose took it over have been musicians like Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, Sir Walter Parratt, Sir Frederick Cowen, Mr. William H. Cummings, Sir Hubert Parry; supreme scientists like Sir George Darwin, F.R.S., Sir Oliver Lodge, F.R.S., Sir William Ramsay, F.R.S., Sir William Crookes, F.R.S., Prof. Schäfer, F.R.S.; great lawyers, like Lord Chancellor Halsbury, the late Lord Chief Justice, and Lord Justice Fletcher Moulton; men who have been great outside the Empire like Sir Robert Hart, and Dr. G. E. Morrison of Peking, and Mr. F. C. Selous, the mighty hunter; great politicians, like Lord Milner, and Lord Wemyss; great explorers, like Sir Ernest Shackleton; great artists, like the late Sir Hubert von Herkomer; distinguished foreigners, like the American Ambassadors, Whitelaw-Reid and Page; well-known literary men, like Harold Cox, secretary of the Cobden Society, Maarten Maartens, Sir Owen Seaman, Sir Sidney Lee, W. B. Maxwell; and great actors, like Sir Herbert Beerbohm-Tree.

The Club retains practically all its old outstanding names, including that of Thring. Thring for many years was the Authors’ Club personified. He not only conducted its business; he peopled the club. Men went to lunch there because they knew they would meet Thring. They dropped in after business hours because they knew that Thring, at any rate, would be there. He kept the social life of the Club, as typified in the Club pools, and so on, going, and he was the friend of all the members, except those who desired to remain unsociable. And, in consequence, he always had his finger on the pulse of the Club.

The questions of club discipline which came up before the board in its early days were some of them of the most extraordinary nature. One man hated hearing clocks tick, and whenever he was left alone in a room always stopped the clock. Somebody else wished to have him turned out of the Club, but the Chairman said he did not see how it could be regarded as ungentlemanly behaviour, and proposed that no action should be taken, but that we should take it in turns never to leave the honourable member alone!

The Rev. John Watson, who, under the pen-name of “Ian Maclaren,” suddenly burst into fame with _Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush_ when he was forty-four years old, was a Liverpool clergyman, the minister of the Sefton Park Presbyterian Church. He had long enjoyed a reputation in his circle in Liverpool for story-telling and as a public speaker. His speeches were as good as his stories, and admirably delivered. His personal charm was as great as the respect in which he was held. He was very humorous. He told us one night, when he was our guest at the Authors’ Club, that his boy at Rugby had said to him, “Father, I suppose that your books are all right to some people, or you would not be able to do so much for us. But couldn’t you write something which would be good enough for me to show the other chaps?”

One wonders if this was the boy who is now the head of Nisbet’s great publishing house. If it was, how pleased he would be to have the publication of some of the books that were not good enough “to show the other chaps!”