Early in September, when I had parted from him to go to Paris, I left him
methodically and industriously arranging for his debut. He had brought some
letters, mainly to newspaper people, and was already making progress toward
what might be called the interior circles of the press, which are so
essential to the success of a newcomer in London. Charles Reade and Andrew
Haliday became zealous friends. It was to the latter that he owed his
introduction to the Savage Club. Here he soon made himself at home. His
manners, even his voice, were half English, albeit he possessed a
most engaging disposition--a ready tact and keen discernment, very
un-English,--and these won him an efficient corps of claquers and backers
throughout the newspapers and periodicals of the metropolis. Thus his
success was assured from the first.

The raw November evening when he opened at Egyptian Hall the room was
crowded with an audience of literary men and women, great and small, from
Swinburne and Edmund Yates to the trumpeters and reporters of the morning
papers. The next day most of these contained glowing accounts. The Times
was silent, but four days later The Thunderer, seeing how the wind blew,
came out with a column of eulogy, and from this onward, each evening proved
a kind of ovation. Seats were engaged for a week in advance. Up and down
Piccadilly, from St. James Church to St. James Street, carriages bearing
the first arms in the kingdom were parked night after night; and the
evening of the 21st of December, six weeks after, there was no falling off.
The success was complete. As to an American, London had never seen the
like.

All this while the poor author of the sport was slowly dying. The demands
upon his animal spirits at the Savage Club, the bodily fatigue of "getting
himself up to it," the "damnable iteration" of the lecture itself, wore him
out. George, his valet, whom he had brought from America, had finally to