returned from some art congress in Liverpool or in Manchester.
'The Salvation Armyism of art,' he called it, & gave a grotesque
description of some city councillor he had found admiring Turner.
Henley, who hated all that Ruskin praised, thereupon derided
Turner, and finding the city councillor the next day on the other
side of the gallery, admiring some Pre-Raphaelite there, derided
that Pre-Raphaelite. The third day Henley discovered the poor man
on a chair in the middle of the room, staring disconsolately upon
the floor. He terrified us also, and certainly I did not dare, and
I think none of us dared, to speak our admiration for book or
picture he condemned, but he made us feel always our importance,
and no man among us could do good work, or show the promise of it,
and lack his praise.

I can remember meeting of a Sunday night Charles Whibley, Kenneth
Grahame, author of 'The Golden Age,' Barry Pain, now a well known
novelist, R. A. M. Stevenson, art critic and a famous talker,
George Wyndham, later on a cabinet minister and Irish chief
secretary, and Oscar Wilde, who was some eight years or ten older
than the rest. But faces and names are vague to me and, while
faces that I met but once may rise clearly before me, a face met
on many a Sunday has perhaps vanished. Kipling came sometimes, I
think, but I never met him; and Stepniak, the nihilist, whom I
knew well elsewhere but not there, said 'I cannot go more than
once a year, it is too exhausting.' Henley got the best out of us
all, because he had made us accept him as our judge and we knew
that his judgment could neither sleep, nor be softened, nor
changed, nor turned aside. When I think of him, the antithesis
that is the foundation of human nature being ever in my sight, I
see his crippled legs as though he were some Vulcan perpetually