arrived within touchable distance, or pro- testing—but this tale is
almost unbearable to those who retain the slightest whiff of childhood—when a heartless nanny marched her charges out of the theatre just as Puss-in- Boots was warming up. Here was a London of horse-drawn buses more varied in colour than the mere tickets are now; a London where Queen Victoria bowed perpetually from a marooned landau at Hammersmith; where Irving rebuked Whistler for laughing at rehearsal; where Henry James, his study equipped for creation in a standing, sitting or reclining posture, brought all his heavy guns into action for the ordering of six jars of marmalade. (If the maestro is guyed a little here, it is with all the benevolent rectitude of a Beerbohm cartoon.) Sit' Compton's memories are not only—to use his loved quotation—thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks ... but they are gay with happiness and appreciation, and they never toll the reader back forlornly to a sole self despairing in the twilight.
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