a different colour.  Could one dine alone in Jermyn Street or Panton Street without this fine piquant evening commentary on the gross newspapers of the morning? (Now you perceive what sort of a man I am, and you guess, rightly, that my age is between thirty and forty.) But the train had stopped at Rugby and started again, and more than half of my journey was accomplished, ere at length I picked up the Gazette, and opened it with the false calm of a drunkard who has sworn that he will not wet his lips before a certain hour.  For, well knowing from experience that I should suffer acute ennui in the train, I had, when buying the Gazette at Euston, taken oath that I would not even glance at it till after Rugby; it is always the final hour of these railway journeys that is the nethermost hell.

The second thing that I saw in the Gazette (the first was of course the ‘Entremets’ column of wit, humour, and parody, very uneven in its excellence) was the death of Simon Fuge.  There was nearly a column about it, signed with initials, and the subheading of the article ran, ‘Sudden death of a great painter’.  That was characteristic of the Gazette.  That Simon Fuge was indeed a great painter is now admitted by most dilettantes, though denied by a few.  But to the great public he was not one of the few great names.  To the great public he was just a medium name.  Ten to one that in speaking of him to a plain person you would feel compelled to add:  ‘The painter, you know,’ and the plain person would respond:  ‘Oh yes,’ falsely pretending that he was perfectly familiar with the name.  Simon Fuge had many friends on the press, and it was solely owing to the loyalty of these friends in the matter of obituary notices that the great public heard more of Simon Fuge in the week after his death than it had heard of him during the thirty-five years of his life.  It may be asked:  Why, if he had so many and such loyal friends on the press, these friends did not take measures to establish his reputation before he died?  The answer is that editors will not allow journalists to praise a living artist much in excess of the esteem in which the public holds him; they are timid.  But when a misunderstood artist is dead the editors will put no limit on laudation.  I am not on the press, but it happens that I know the world.

Of all the obituary notices of Simon Fuge, the Gazette’s was the first.  Somehow the Gazette had obtained exclusive news of the little event, and some one high up on the Gazette’s staff had a very exalted notion indeed of Fuge, and must have known him personally.  Fuge received his deserts as a painter in that column of print.  He was compared to Sorolla y Bastida for vitality; the morbidezza of his flesh-tints was stated to be unrivalled even by —­I forget the name, painting is not my speciality.  The writer blandly inquired why examples of Fuge’s work were to be seen in the Luxembourg, at Vienna, at Florence, at Dresden; and not, for instance, at the Tate Gallery,