I was aware of my good fortune. I remember thinking how much more
delightful it must be to come fresh to London than to be like so many of
my friends, Londoners born and bred. They could not be thrilled as I was
by the sight of St. Paul's or Westminster Abbey, or by the scimitar
curve of the Thames from Blackfriars to Westminster. Through the
National Gallery or the British Museum I paced a king. The vista of the
London River as I went to Greenwich intoxicated me like heady wine. And
Hampton Court in the spring, _Ut vidi ut perii_--"How I saw, how I
perished." It was all a pageant of pure pleasure, and I walked on air,
eating the fruit of the Hesperides.
But though I was so fully convinced that the doors of _The
Spectator_ were shut against me, I was, of course, determined that my
two reviews should, if possible, make the editors feel what a huge
mistake they had made and what a loss they were incurring. But, alas!
here I encountered a great disappointment. When I had written my reviews
they appeared to me to be total failures! I was living at the time in an
"upper part" in South Molton Street, in which I, my younger brother,
Henry Strachey, and two of my greatest friends, the present Sir Bernard
Mallet and his younger brother Stephen Mallet, had set up house.
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