Night it was--nay, nearer morning, Snores and nightmares whisked about, And the pallid moon gave warning That her lamp was nearly out. Twain we sat, and ruminated On the world, its joys and ills, What we loved, and what we hated, Woman, wine--exams and bills.
Often, too, with short-lived splendour, Flashed the ready epigram, Thoughts we uttered, soft and tender, Ending in a smothered "----"; All the truths and lies of ages Compassed we in one short breath, Flouted whims of priests and sages, Lightly toyed with life and death.
Men and manners, saints and sinners, All and more we touched upon, How the worst were ever winners, For _we_ yet had never won; And we cursed at superstition, Villain smiles, and sects, and cants, Hurled to ruin and perdition All the tribe of sycophants--
Queried, thinking of cold faces, Colder hearts of living stone, Why our lot within such places, Why upon such days was thrown; In our years' maturing crescent Spied we how our fate was fraught, Spanned the future and the present With the flimsy bridge of thought.
So the morn came, pale and haggard, Lighting up our sunken eyes, And we rose and thither staggered Whence we would but slowly rise; Plain our footsteps, weak and frisky, Told their moral--speak who can-- Midnight words and midnight whiskey Play the devil with a man!
[Illustration: (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY MESSRS. ELLIOTT AND FRY.)]
It is a far cry back to 1853, when dreams of writing a book had almost reached the boundary line of "probable events." I was then a pale, long-haired, consumptive-looking youth, who had been successful in prize poems--for there were prize competitions even in those far-off days--and in acrostics, and in the acceptance of one or two short stories, which had been actually published in a magazine that did not pay for contributions (it was edited by a clergyman of the Church of England, too, and the chaplain to a real Duke), and which magazine has gone the way of many magazines, and is now as extinct as the Dodo. It was in the year 1853, or a month or two earlier, that I wrote my first novel--which, upon a moderate computation, I think, would make four or five good-sized library volumes, but I have never attempted to "scale" the manuscript. It is in my possession still, although I have not seen it for many weary years. It is buried with a heap more rubbish in a respectable old oak chest, the key of which is even lost to me. And yet that MS. was the turning-point of my small literary career. And it is the history of that manuscript which leads up to the publication of my first novel; my first step, though I did not know it, and hence it is part and parcel of the history of my first book--a link in the chain.