United States or Senegal ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
For Roosevelt and Platt still had their pitched battles. The most epic of them all was fought over the reappointment of the State Superintendent of Insurance. The incumbent was Louis F. Payn, a veteran petty boss from a country district and one of Platt's right-hand men.
My negotiations with Payn were successful, and on the appointed evening, a Sunday, he and I set forth in a hansom for Rutland Gardens. I remember that on the way Payn, who was in exceptionally high spirits, informed me of the engagement of his daughter Alice to Mr. Buckle, the young editor of the Times.
When, in later days, I read these tributes to the splendid and unselfish service which Payn had rendered to English literature, I always recalled him as I saw him in the dingy office in Paternoster Row on that day in 1868, when he first gave me the right hand of fellowship. I shall have much to say of him hereafter.
With much trepidation for I was still a neophyte in London literary life I addressed a personal note to Mr. Payn, asking for an interview. I got a cordial reply, inviting me to call upon him at the office of Messrs. Chambers in Paternoster Row.
Whether eating Time makes the chief of his diet out of old editions; whether Providence has passed a special enactment on behalf of authors; or whether these last have taken the law into their own hand, bound themselves into a dark conspiracy with a password, which I would die rather than reveal, and night after night sally forth under some vigorous leader, such as Mr James Payn or Mr Walter Besant, on their task of secret spoliation certain it is, at least, that the old editions pass, giving place to new.
Payn was an extremely agreeable person with a great talent for amusing, the measure of which he perhaps took pretty early consoling himself for a total absence of high pretension by a perhaps not quite genuine affectation of good-natured but distinctly Philistine cynicism, and a half serious, half affected belief that other men's delight in their schools, their universities, the great classics of the past, etc., was blague.
But perhaps this is not all that you are entitled to ask of it. And as Mr. Payn began with Poems, and some other suggestive books, I am inclined to think that perhaps he did not always regard literature as a thing of the kind of a superior railway sandwich. It is quite certain that, in his beginning, Mr.
Perhaps my friendship with William Black and James Payn had some influence in leading me to revert to a kind of work which in my youth had attracted me greatly. I had already, as I have said, written one novel, "The Lumley Entail," published in the St. James's Magazine, and long since forgotten by everybody, including its author.
EDUCATIONAL REFORM IN ENGLAND. Education, writes James Payn in the Independent, has for a long time, as regards the upper classes, been in the hands of impostors and coxcombs.
But some of them privately and hastily assured the Governor that these resolutions were for public consumption only, and that they would be delighted to have Payn superseded.
Word Of The Day