JOSEPH KNIGHT.
as anybody, but not unduly excited, and settled himself down with his customary calm to criticize the remainder of the play. On his coming out of the theatre, however, the shouting mass of humanity in the street brought home to him the full significance of the news of the night. The contagion of collective emotion overpowered him. 'My eyes were streaming with tears,' he told me, 'and I was in danger of being mobbed for a pro-Boer before I could get into a cab.'
"What a memory the man had! I never knew him to consult a work of reference or make a misquotation. He seemed to have all the classics by heart, and his recollections of the interesting people he had known, and the interesting things they had said and done, appeared to be inexhaustible.
Dinner at the
Savoy."I had the privilege of taking the chair at the dinner which his colleagues gave him at the Savoy on the occasion of his retirement from The Daily Graphic. He made a speech full of personal anecdote of a deeply interesting character, and after dinner the most of us gathered round to listen to an exchange of reminiscences between him and his old friend Ashby-Sterry."
Mr. Gowing tells me that "Knight always remained to correct his proof—a necessary precaution, as his handwriting was not of the most legible—and frequently he would then go to the Garrick and write a notice of the play for the next day's Globe, before going home to bed," so that it should appear the same afternoon. He never wrote a line in the theatre.
The Radical defeat in 1895 tempted him to the following jeu d'esprit, which appeared in The St. James's Gazette on July 23rd, 1895, and which I give with the cordial permission of Mr. C. Arthur Pearson. The same day Knight brought the paper and read the lines to me, laughing so heartily that he could hardly get through them:
THE BANNERMAN'S LAMENT.
'The
Bannerman's
Lament.'
Wherefor, wherefor do ye greet,
Tammy Ellis, Tammy Ellis?
At the Radical defeat?
Tammy Ellis mine.
Weel we ken ye were at faut,
Tammy Ellis, Tammy Ellis;
Nappin' this time ye've been caught,
Tammy Ellis mine.
'Tisna for the siller lost,
Tammy Ellis, Tammy Ellis,
I maun wail and count the cost.
Tammy Ellis mine.
