After dinner a general “clear” was made in the direction of halls and theatres, a few friends would drop in about twelve, and continue their drinking till three or four; but Saturday night was gala night—­at half-past eleven the lords drove up in their hansoms, then a genius or two would arrive, and supper and singing went merrily until the chimney sweeps began to go by, and we took chairs and bottles into the street and entered into discussion with the policeman.  Twelve hours later we struggled out of our beds, and to the sound of church bells we commenced writing.  The paper appeared on Tuesday.  Our host sat in a small room off the dining-room from which he occasionally emerged to stimulate our lagging pens.

But I could not learn to see life paragraphically.  I longed to give a personal shape to something, and personal shape could not be achieved in a paragraph nor in an article.  True it is that I longed for art, but I longed also for fame, or was it notoriety?  Both.  I longed for fame, fame, brutal and glaring, fame that leans to notoriety.  Out with you, liars that you are, tell the truth, say you would sell the souls you don’t believe in, or do believe in, for notoriety.  I have known you attend funerals for the sake of seeing your miserable names in the paper.  You, hypocritical reader, who are now turning up your eyes and murmuring “horrid young man”—­examine your weakly heart, and see what divides us; I am not ashamed of my appetites, I proclaim them, what is more I gratify them; you’re silent, you refrain, and you dress up natural sins in hideous garments of shame, you would sell your wretched soul for what I would not give the parings of my finger-nails for—­paragraphs in a society paper.  I am ashamed of nothing I have done, especially my sins, and I boldly confess that I then desired notoriety.  I walked along the streets mad; I turned upon myself like a tiger.  “Am I going to fail again as I have failed before?” I asked myself.  “Will my novel prove as abortive as my paintings, my poetry, my journalism?” I looked back upon my life,—­mediocrity was branded about my life.  “Would it be the same to the end?” I asked myself a thousand times by day, and a thousand times by night.  We all want notoriety, our desire for notoriety is hideous if you will, but it is less hideous when it is proclaimed from a brazen tongue than when it hides its head in the cant of human humanitarianism.  Humanity be hanged!  Self, and after self a friend; the rest may go to the devil; and be sure that when any man is more stupidly vain and outrageously egotistic than his fellows, he will hide his hideousness in humanitarianism.  Victor Hugo was hideous with self, and the innermost stench of the humanitarianism he vented about him is unbearable to any stomach, not excepting even Mr. Swinburne’s, who occasionally holds his nose with one hand while he waves the censer with the other.  Humanity be hanged!  Men of inferior genius, Victor Hugo and Mr. Gladstone,