394 Mr. Leonard Huxley [June 3, 



WEEKLY EVENING MEETING, 



Friday, June 3, 1921. 



Sir James Cbichton-Browne, J. P. M.D. LL.D. F.R.S., 

 Treasurer and Vice-President, in the Chair. 



Leonard Huxley, LL.D., Editor of the " Cornhiil Magazine." 



Chronicles of Cornhiil." 



Dr. Johnson uttered many true sayings about human nature. 

 Among the rest he was quite right when he laid it down as a rule 

 that even anonymous writers want to be paid well for writing well. 

 The implication is that good writing is hard work, and good writers 

 do not care to work for nothing, nor to do bad work. Nor are they 

 alone in these sentiments. There exist publishers also who, while 

 sharing the same laudable desire to be paid for their work, yet are 

 too proud to associate their name with anything that cannot fairly 

 rank as literature. Such a publisher was George Smith, for over half 

 a century head of the house of Smith, Elder, to whom indeed the 

 toils of publishing were, so to say, something of a relaxation among 

 the vaster cares and responsibilities of his great East India business. 

 Literature and art had early cast a charm upon him, although he was 

 himself neither artist nor writer. 



His personal intercourse with writing folk began early. "While he 

 was still in his teens, and before he had started his precocious career 

 as the boy-publisher, his father had begun publishing the works of 

 the budding genius, John Ruskin. This was the beginning of a close 

 friendship and constant visits to the Ruskins' house, where George 

 Smith was thrilled by the eloquence and imagination of young John, 

 and touched by the devotion — sometimes pushed to a humorous 

 extreme — of his admiring parents. Here, too, he came to know 

 Richmond and Millais, destined long afterwards to draw for the 

 "Cornhiil" ; Burne- Jones and Alexander Munro the sculptor, and 

 among these he also found life-long friends. 



A number of other literary friendships he owed to Thomas 

 Powell. Among them were Leigh Hunt and G. A. Sala, Bohemian 

 of the Bohemians, who used to keep his oak sported for fear of duns, 

 but had a secret code with his friends, according to which they 

 announced their pacific arrival by dropping a penny noisily through 



* The Discourse in full is printed in the " Cornhiil Magazine," Vol. LIT., 

 p. 364 (March), 1922. 



