never grudged it to me, which is a great deal
more than I can say for the family friends,
who were perfectly scandalised at my living
rent free. Indeed, I once overheard one of
them (a lady too) trying to make my mother
uncomfortable by asking her how much I
paid towards the housekeeping expenses.

Pressed at last into the smallest of all
possible corners by the dire necessity of
keeping up appearances, with insufficient means
(for though I worked hard at my profession,
I had, as usual, to bide my time till profitable
employment chose to find me out), I
actually ended in the final refuge of all the
destitute. I, the offspring of a respectable
stock—I, as prosperous, to all outward
appearance, as any gentleman in London—found
myself, one day, making common cause with
the raggedest wretches in creation, and finding
my way into a certain commercial
establishment, the entrance to which was decorated
by three brilliantly-gilded balls, arranged in
the form of an inverted pyramid, and accompanied
by the assurance that money was
advanced to any amount on every description
of valuable property. To this house of call
for all the poverties, I found it necessary to
repair with every particle of valuable
property in my possession, even to a pair of
highly-prized gold sleeve-links. Alas! how
well I remember the commotion caused in
the house when but a few months before I
had discovered that I could no longer exist
with my wristbands secured by means of a
mother-of-pearl button, as heretofore, but
must have my shirt sleeves altered
elaborately to the infinite disgust of the female
members of the family, all of whom had to
be engaged in the reformation. Truly "the
gods do of our pleasant vices make
instruments to scourge us." How I cursed my
wretched coxcombry afterwards, when I
found that in consequence of the alteration in
my linen, I must spend eighteen pence out
of the sovereign, reluctantly advanced on the
sleeve buttons, in purchasing a pair of agate
links, ignobly fastened together with brass!

From sleeve buttons I got to boots, and
from boots to books. I should not like some
of our eminent authors to know at what
amount the pecuniary worth of their productions
is estimated by the gentlemen who
advance money on every description of valuable
property. From books I got to pictures, and
this past piece of poverty-stricken experience
was the most humiliating of any that I had
yet had to undergo.

"You see, sir, this ain't in our line," said
one of the gentlemen who advanced money,
to whom I repaired with a work of art from
my own easel. He held the picture, while
he spoke, in a slanting direction, so that the
light caught on all the little projecting nobs
of paint, and on the brush hairs and dust
which had been incorporated with the surface
while it was wet. "This ain't in our line at
all. How much did you want on it now?"
I had asked at the Royal Academy Exhibition
thirty pounds for the picture, but the
sort of way in which the market value of
this choice production of my brain had
diminished in my eyes, during this brief
interview, is not to be told. So I modestly
intimated that ten pounds was the loan I
required, though that, of course, I said was
infinitely below the real worth of the work.
The reception of this piece of information by
the gentleman on the opposite side of the
counter was peculiar, at any rate, if it was
not satisfactory. He uttered no sound, nor
did the slightest change take place in the
expression of his features. He spread out
very carefully on the counter the Supplement
to the Times in which I had brought my
treasure, wrapped up, to his establishment.
He turned my ill-used gem on its face upon
the newspaper, lapped the surplus paper over
the sides, secured the whole with string, and
still without breaking his awful silence
handed the package across to me with one
hand, while with the other he received a
flannel petticoat from a lady in the next box,
of whom I could discover nothing, as she was
hidden by the partition, except that her hand
was old and shrivelled, and that by a curious
coincidence, there entered the shop at the
same moment with her a very strong smell
of ardent spirits. At the next establishment
I reduced my demand to five pounds, and
ended in a degrading acceptance of the sum
of fifteen shillings.

It was just when things were thus with me,
that a very old friend came forward to effect
my rescue from despair. I must say a word
or two about this individual, for he was my
First Patron.

By means of certain personal qualifications
and of a wonderful "get up" as actors phrase
it—by frequenting picture-sales and private
views—by giving his opinions in very few
words and accompanying them by shrugs,
he had got to be looked upon by all his
friends as a profound art-connoisseur, and by
some of them as an enlightened patron as
well, and one potential with the press in all
matters of criticism. This highly-respected
gentleman was, when I knew him, between
fifty and sixty years of age, and was precisely
the kind of man, to look at, whom a congregation
would feel must be secured as a churchwarden
at any price. His thin fine hair was
of a light brown colour, dry and weak; he
wore no whiskers, or any form of beard; he
was of the middle height, with a body rather
disposed to corpulence, and legs very much
inclined to thinness. His costume was artful
in the extreme—a loose black coat, cut like a
dress coat, but high in the collar and with
broad skirts, in which were large outside
pockets with flaps to them, which flaps were,
not uncommonly, pushed up by bundles of
mysterious-looking papers. He wore a double-
breasted waistcoat of snowy whiteness, and a