my friends, Londoners born and bred. They could not be thrilled as I was
by the sight of St. Paul's or Westminster Abbey, or by the scimitar
curve of the Thames from Blackfriars to Westminster. Through the
National Gallery or the British Museum I paced a king. The vista of the
London River as I went to Greenwich intoxicated me like heady wine. And
Hampton Court in the spring, _Ut vidi ut perii_--"How I saw, how I
perished." It was all a pageant of pure pleasure, and I walked on air,
eating the fruit of the Hesperides.

But though I was so fully convinced that the doors of _The
Spectator_ were shut against me, I was, of course, determined that my
two reviews should, if possible, make the editors feel what a huge
mistake they had made and what a loss they were incurring. But, alas!
here I encountered a great disappointment. When I had written my reviews
they appeared to me to be total failures! I was living at the time in an
"upper part" in South Molton Street, in which I, my younger brother,
Henry Strachey, and two of my greatest friends, the present Sir Bernard
Mallet and his younger brother Stephen Mallet, had set up house. I
remember to this day owning to my brother that though I had intended my
review of _Gulliver's Travels_ to be epoch-making, it had turned
out a horrible fiasco. However, I somehow felt I should only flounder
deeper into the quagmire of my own creation if I rewrote the two
reviews. Accordingly, they were sent off in the usual way. Knowing my
father's experience in such matters, I did not expect to get them back
in type for many weeks. As a matter of fact, they came back quite
quickly. I corrected the proofs and returned them. To my astonishment
the review of Swift appeared almost at once. I supposed, in the luxury
of depression, that they wished to cast the rubbish out of the way as
quickly as possible.