Each return home brought experiences of a different kind. 'I have known,'
he says, 'everyone worth knowing from 1850 to my death.' At seven years
old he was seeing and hearing the famous persons of that time, either at
the home in Sloane Street, to which Wentworth Dilke's connection with the
Exhibition drew men eminent in the world of physical science and
industrial enterprise, as well as the artists with whom his
connoisseurship brought him into touch; or else at old Mr. Dilke's house
in Lower Grosvenor Place. He remembered visits with his grandfather to
Gore House, 'before Soyer turned it into the Symposium,' and to Lady
Morgan's. The brilliant little Irishwoman was a familiar friend, and her
pen, of bog-oak and gold, the gift to her of the Irish people, came at
last to lie among the treasures of 76, Sloane Street. Also there remained
with him

"memories from about 1851 of the bright eyes of little Louis Blanc, of
Milner-Gibson's pleasant smile, of Bowring's silver locks, of
Thackeray's tall stooping figure, of Dickens's goatee, of Paxton's
white hat, of Barry Cornwall and his wife, of Robert Stephenson the
engineer, to whom I wanted to be bound apprentice, of Browning (then
known as 'Mrs. Browning's husband'), of Joseph Cooke (another
engineer), of Cubitt the builder (one of the promoters of the
Exhibition), of John Forster the historian, of the Redgraves, and of
that greater painter, John Martin. Also of the Rowland Hills, at
Hampstead.

"1859 was the height of my rage for our South Kensington Trap-Bat
Club, which I think had invented the name South Kensington. It was at
it that I first met Emilia Francis Strong. We played in the garden of
Gore House where the Conservatory of the Horticultural Society, behind