always a very vain man--had suffered no diminution, and with the
first balmy breezes of success his arrogance grew unbounded. Shortly
afterwards, he chanced to come in the way of CHEPSTOWE; he impressed
the poet favourably, and in the result he was selected for a place
on the staff of _The Metropolitan Messenger_, then striving by every
known method to battle its way into a circulation.

It was at this stage in his career that I met GRUBLET. He was pointed
out to me as a young man of promise who had a trenchant style, and had
lately written an article on "Provincialism in Literature," which had
caused some stir by its bitter and uncompromising attacks upon certain
well-known authors and journalists. I looked at the man with some
interest. I saw a pale-faced, sandy-haired little creature with a
shuffling, weak-kneed gait, who looked as if a touch from a moderately
vigorous arm would have swept him altogether out of existence.
His manner was affected and unpleasant, his conversation the most
disagreeable I ever listened to. He was coarse, not with an ordinary
coarseness, but with a kind of stale, fly-blown coarseness as of
the viands in the window of a cheap restaurant. He assumed a great
reverence for RABELAIS and ARISTOPHANES; he told shady stories,
void of point and humour, which you were to suppose were modelled
on the style of these two masters. And all the time he gave you to
understand, with a blatant self-sufficiency, that he himself was one
of the greatest and most formidable beings in existence. This was
GRUBLET as I first knew him, and so he continued to the end.

The one thing this puny creature could never forgive was that any
of his friends should pass him in the race. There was one whom
GRUBLET--the older of the two--had at one time honoured with his
patronage and approval. No sooner, however, had the younger gained a