PREFACE

Now that the midnight of life is at hand, before the last chime of the curfew must ring out, I have been busying myself in writing down memories of the people who brightened its morning, its noon and its evening. It was my fate long ago to be associated with men older, sometimes much older, than myself, and so it happens that few indeed of the friends of my early manhood are now left. Except where it is absolutely necessary in order to tell the rest of my tale, I have not dealt with the living. To praise them might seem sycophantic, to blame them an impertinence. It would be overbold in me to write a chronicle of my own days were I not able to say with Horace:

My life, indeed, has been largely spent amongst men who in many lands have made the history of their time. The story of their public achievements is, or will be, written in the annals of their countries. The story of their private lives is often unknown to, and therefore put on one side by, their biographers. To rescue from oblivion here and there some intimate feature, some petty detail which may help to make known the real personalities of such men—perhaps to remove a wrong impression—is the humble object of this book, and it is to the shades of those who did so much for me that I offer it as a grateful tribute.

I have to thank Sir Ernest Satow for allowing me to check by his own journals and records what I have written about the adventurous years which we spent together in Japan. I must also express my gratitude to Mr. Edmund Gosse for much encouragement and patient advice—without his sympathy these pages would hardly have seen the light. To the Editor of the National Review I am indebted for permission to reproduce an article which has appeared in his pages. Similar thanks for the use of an article on Lord Lyons in the Candid Review are due to Mr. Gibson Bowles.