Were it possible for us to be transported back to the London of the fifties the sight of a Thackeray, a Dickens, a Tennyson, or a Browning would not have been necessary to stir our pulses.

It would have been an event to have seen in the flesh some of the humbler men, G.P.R.James, or Samuel Warren, of "Ten Thousand a Year," or any of the ephemeral celebrities who adorned the pages of the Maclise Gallery of Portraits.

So why disdain, merely because they are of our own time, the makers of copy who may be seen on the Fifth Avenue of today?
I remember my first literary walk down the Avenue.

It was in the company of Mr.Edward W.Townsend.I was very young, and he was the creator of Chimmie Fadden, and the author of "A Daughter of the Tenements," and I wished that all the world might see.
Then the time came when the sight of literary faces was less of a novelty, when it was not unusual to meet the author of "The Rise of Silas Lapham," who had left his home on Fifty-ninth Street, facing the Park, for an afternoon stroll, and to receive his nod of kindly recognition; or to pass Edmund Clarence Stedman, to whom I owed, as so many others have owed, the first words of encouragement, or to see Frank R.Stockton, or Mr.Gilder and Mr.Johnson of the "Century," or Brander Matthews on his way to the club in West Forty-third Street.
Looking down upon the Avenue, at the corner of Thirty-third Street, just below the Waldorf, are familiar windows.

They belonged to a hotel that was, or is, the Cambridge, and in the rooms behind the windows, I recall occasional pleasant and profitable hours spent in the company of Richard Harding Davis.