THE PARSON AND THE PAINTER 323 



not express any surprise or pleasure at the meeting after 

 so long an interval, but once more said : " Phil, old 

 man, lend me half-a-crown, will you ? " Such was 

 the greeting extended to Phil May at Romano's on his 

 homecoming. 



He always found the wherewithal to respond to such 

 demands, though before he went to Australia he was 

 often desperately hard up himself. He and Mrs May 

 used to live in a little three-roomed flat in Covent 

 Garden, and she used to do all the domestic work, but 

 they seemed quite happy. I once supped in that flat 

 when Phil May came of age. There were about half-a- 

 dozen of us present, among them being A. M. Broadley, 

 who was then by way of editing The World for Edmund 

 Yates, and also doing much propaganda work for 

 Augustus Harris and Drury Lane. As we were crowded 

 in that little room, the lay figure got much in the way, 

 but there was nowhere else to put it. I can see that 

 lay figure very conspicuously in much of Phil May's 

 early work, but after his return from Australia he always 

 used proper models. 



It is not strictly true that he reduced his work with 

 special care to the really important lines because 

 the processes of reproduction were in those days so 

 bad. Phil May's line drawing was always so clear and 

 strong that it lost practically nothing by reproduction 

 at any time. He liked, however, to show how much 

 could really be done by a few lines, and there he was 

 certainly a past master. It was not in his early days 

 that he made these sketches in which so much was shown 

 by so little. It was in the latter times when he was a 

 much more consummate artist and had made a full study 

 of anatomy. 



He returned to England for some time in the spring of 

 1890, and it was then that I thought out the scheme of 

 The Parson and the Painter, which was to bring out the 

 very best that was then in him. The idea was a simple 

 one viz. that an unsophisticated Parson should deem it 



