Mike knew where his comforts lay, and he accepted his friend’s offer.  There they founded, and there they edited, the Pilgrim, a weekly sixpenny paper devoted to young men, their doings, their amusements, their literature, and their art.  Under their dual editorship this journal had prospered; it now circulated five thousand a week, and published twelve pages of advertisements.  Frank, whose bent was hospitality, was therefore able to entertain his friends as it pleased him, and his rooms were daily and nightly filled with revelling lords, comic vocalists, and chorus girls.  Mike often craved for other amusements and other society.  Temple Gardens was but one page in the book of life, and every page in that book was equally interesting to him.  He desired all amusements, to know all things, to be loved by every one; and longing for new sensations of life, he often escaped to the Cock tavern for a quiet dinner with some young barristers, and a quiet smoke afterwards with them in their rooms.  It was there he had met John Norton.

The Pilgrim was composed of sixteen columns of paragraphs in which society, art, and letters were dealt with—­the form of expression preferred being the most exaggerated.  Indeed, the formula of criticism that Mike and Frank, guided by Harding, had developed, was to consider as worthless all that the world held in estimation, and to laud as best all that world had agreed to discard.  John Norton’s views regarding Latin literature had been adopted, and Virgil was declared to be the great old bore of antiquity, and some three or four quite unknown names, gathered amid the Fathers, were upon occasion trailed in triumph with adjectives of praise.

What painter of Madonnas does the world agree to consider as the greatest?  Raphael—­Raphael was therefore decried as being scarcely superior to Sir Frederick Leighton; and one of the early Italian painters, Francesco Bianchi, whom Vasari exhumes in some three or four lines, was praised as possessing a subtle and mysterious talent very different indeed from the hesitating smile of La Jaconde.  There is a picture of the Holy Family by him in the Louvre, and of it Harding wrote—­“This canvas exhales for us the most delicious emanations, sorrowful bewitchments, insidious sacrileges, and troubled prayers.”

All institutions, especially the Royal Academy, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Drury Lane Theatre, and Eton College, were held to be the symbols of man’s earthiness, the bar-room and music-hall as certain proof of his divine origin; actors were scorned and prize-fighters revered; the genius of courtesans, the folly of education, and the poetry of pantomime formed the themes on which the articles which made the centre of the paper were written.  Insolent letters were addressed to eminent people, and a novel by Harding, the hero of which was a butler and the heroine a cook, was in course of publication.