ABSTRACT
Something more than a quarter of a century ago, before I went out to help my uncle Benjamin as a tea-planter in Assam, I used to know a little about the Bohemian circles of the town. It was rather a fashion among young fellows from Oxford and Cambridge in those days. The Thackeray tradition was still with us, and at that time we used to read “Pendennis” and “The Newcomes” and “The Adventures of Philip.” I am told that people do not read them any longer, preferring the polished compositions and chaste fancies of certain later novelists. It may be so. We are apt to fall a little behind the current of popular literature in the remoter East. At any rate, we youngsters in the seventies knew our Thackeray, with our Dickens, our Clough, our Tennyson and other now perhaps obsolete writers, and came up to London emulous of the brave life which those gallant heroes, Warrington and Pen and Clive Newcome, led so dashingly among the taverns and the theatres, the men of the quill, and the brothers of the brush and palette-knife. Like most other things, the reality proved hardly equal to the illusion. We had hummed over the famous lines—
