SO much of preface seems necessary to this volume as may justify its publication and explain itsorigin. The writer was for many years my closest friend. It was in the summer of 1873 that a lady, whose gracious influence has helped to shape and encourage more than one distinguished career, first awakened my interest in him and drew us together. He was at that time a lad of twenty-two, with his powers not yet set nor his way of life determined. But to know him was to recognise atonce that here was a young genius of whom great things might be expected. A slender, boyishpresence, with a graceful, somewhat fantastic bearing, and a singular power and attraction in the eyesand smile, were the signs that first impressed you; and the impression was quickly confirmed anddeepened by the charm of his talk, which was irresistibly sympathetic and inspiring, and not less fullof matter than of mirth. I have known no man in whom the poet's heart and imagination werecombined with such a brilliant strain of humour and such an unsleeping alertness and adroitness ofthe critical intelligence. But it was only in conversation that he could as yet do himself justice. Hisearliest efforts in literature were of a very uneven and tentative quality. The reason partly was that inmode of expression and choice of language, no less than in the formation of opinion and theconduct of life, he was impatient, even to excess, of the conventional, the accepted, and thetrite. His perceptions and emotions were acute and vivid in the extreme; his judgments, whetherfounded on experience, reading, discussion, or caprice (and a surprising amount of all these thingshad been crowded into his youthful existence) were not less fresh and personal; while to his ardentfancy the world was a theatre glowing with the lights and bustling with the incidents of romance. Tofind for all he had to say words of vital aptness and animation-to communicate as much aspossible of what he has somewhere called 'the incommunicable thrill of things'-was from the firsthis endeavour in literature, nay more, it was the main passion of his life. The instrument that shouldserve his purpose could not be forged in haste, still less could it be adopted at second hand or readymade; and he has himself narrated how long and toilsome was the apprenticeship he serv