“He was a Balliol man,” said MacShaughnassy, “and his Christian name was Joseph.  He was a member of the ‘Devonshire’ at the time I knew him, and was, I think, the most superior person I have ever met.  He sneered at the Saturday Review as the pet journal of the suburban literary club; and at the Athenaeum as the trade organ of the unsuccessful writer.  Thackeray, he considered, was fairly entitled to his position of favourite author to the cultured clerk; and Carlyle he regarded as the exponent of the earnest artisan.  Living authors he never read, but this did not prevent his criticising them contemptuously.  The only inhabitants of the nineteenth century that he ever praised were a few obscure French novelists, of whom nobody but himself had ever heard.  He had his own opinion about God Almighty, and objected to Heaven on account of the strong Clapham contingent likely to be found in residence there.  Humour made him sad, and sentiment made him ill.  Art irritated him and science bored him.  He despised his own family and disliked everybody else.  For exercise he yawned, and his conversation was mainly confined to an occasional shrug.

“Nobody liked him, but everybody respected him.  One felt grateful to him for his condescension in living at all.

“One summer, I was fishing over the Norfolk Broads, and on the Bank Holiday, thinking I would like to see the London ’Arry in his glory, I ran over to Yarmouth.  Walking along the sea-front in the evening, I suddenly found myself confronted by four remarkably choice specimens of the class.  They were urging on their wild and erratic career arm-in-arm.  The one nearest the road was playing an unusually wheezy concertina, and the other three were bawling out the chorus of a music-hall song, the heroine of which appeared to be ‘Hemmer.’

“They spread themselves right across the pavement, compelling all the women and children they met to step into the roadway.  I stood my ground on the kerb, and as they brushed by me something in the face of the one with the concertina struck me as familiar.

“I turned and followed them.  They were evidently enjoying themselves immensely.  To every girl they passed they yelled out, ’Oh, you little jam tart!’ and every old lady they addressed as ‘Mar.’  The noisiest and the most vulgar of the four was the one with the concertina.

“I followed them on to the pier, and then, hurrying past, waited for them under a gas-lamp.  When the man with the concertina came into the light and I saw him clearly I started.  From the face I could have sworn it was Joseph; but everything else about him rendered such an assumption impossible.  Putting aside the time and the place, and forgetting his behaviour, his companions, and his instrument, what remained was sufficient to make the suggestion absurd.  Joseph was always clean shaven; this youth had a smudgy moustache and a pair of incipient red whiskers.  He was dressed in the loudest check suit I have ever seen, off the stage.  He wore patent-leather boots with mother-of-pearl buttons, and a necktie that in an earlier age would have called down lightning out of Heaven.  He had a low-crowned billycock hat on his head, and a big evil-smelling cigar between his lips.