Friendship with Lucas, though it could be both fluent and free, called for tact. While on the surface equable, he suffered from sensitiveness which could twist a chance inattention into a deliberate affront, or an ironic comment into an accusation. Personally a wit, he belonged, I always thought, to the days of the hansom cab and the historic Café Royal; and it was unquestionable that he remembered those days, or believed he remembered them, with affection.

He had been 'reader', not indeed for John Lane, the publisher around whom Beardsley, Richard le Gallienne, and Max Beerbohm revolved, but for Grant Richards when that bold fellow went into business at the end of the 'nineties; and he claimed to have brought to the Richards list authors as diverse as Richard Whiteing (Number 5 John Street) and Ernest Bramah, who wrote The Wallet of Kai Lung. The Dumpy Books for Children, which included the immortal Little Black Sambo, were also made while he was with Richards.

Lucas spoke slowly, hardly moving his lips, in a deep voice like the meditative song of the bumble bee. His manner was benign. A smile, indulgent yet thoughtful, hardly ever left his face, which coarsened as he grew older and, now that I come to envisage it, had no great range of expression. He had an extraordinary gift and longing for personal affection; and it was at the same time necessary for him to go his own way in perpetual solitude. I think he preferred unexacting male to more demanding female company, not because he disliked women, but because men would eat and drink with him and go away without disturbing his peace of mind. He was not possessive, though I am sure he knew the emotion of jealousy. His friendships included appreciative contacts with Barrie, Bennett, and Wells, whom he enjoyed in small doses. These men never, to my knowledge, attended the feasts he gave at the Orleans Club in King Street, St James's.

At such feasts he provided (or when I was there he provided) roast saddle of mutton to eat, champagne to drink, and as after-entertainment the most astonishing conjuror I ever saw, a genius who baffled everybody present with his impenetrable craft. Lucas, at the head of the table, listened darkly but unfrowningly to all he could hear, sitting with almost sack-like relaxation, and making no attempt to lead the talk or stimulate the vivacity of his companions. His feasts were thus static, resembling casual assemblies around a long club table, where men exchange anecdotes, but not ideas.

The guests were usually other men of letters rather than imaginative writers (he did not love 'the adroit novelists of talent, calculating the risks and being as candid as they dare'), with some actors, lawyers, and at least one or two publishers for good measure. I even, once, saw a literary agent; but he must have been there as a friend, for Lucas was too detached to mingle business with pleasure.

His friendships perhaps explain a discrepancy between his reputation, which in the literary world was considerable, and his actual performance as a writer. A disapproving rival once accounted to me for this reputation and its rewards in press cordiality by saying resentfully (this was long before I met Lucas), 'he knows everybody in Fleet Street'. It was probably true; but he was neither a pusher nor a wire-puller. He was first of all a friend, punctilious in every detail of personal relationship, so that if one had been his host, even for lunch, there was always, the following day, a note of warm thanks. A short note, of course; when it was thought possible that after his death a collection of his letters might delight the world, they were found too meagre for the purpose.

At a little distance from friendship, but below it, came his work as publisher, as bookman (that extinct species), and as biographer and editor of Charles Lamb. His acquaintance with half- or wholly-forgotten literature was wide; he had read in poetry and belles-lettres, and zestfully remembered, more than the majority of professors digest in a lifetime. But he was not a scholar; he was a taster of good things, what George Saintsbury, speaking of himself, called 'an intelligent voluptuary', and his aim was to share pleasure, not to teach.

His anthologies, The Open Road and two volumes of ancient and modern letters called The Gentlest Art and The Second Post, are beautifully adroit, and it is a pity that the day for them is past. On that day men used to go for long country walks with a book stuffed into one pocket of a Norfolk jacket and a packet of sandwiches in another, while concealed about their persons they carried a flask which held a not necessarily alcoholic beverage. Sitting by tranquil waysides, they would eat the sandwiches, drink from the flask, and lie back drowsing over a Lucas anthology, or perhaps The Compleat Angler, Ben Jonson's Discoveries, or Selden's Table Talk, until they were ready for another ten miles on their feet. Publishers used the word 'pocketable' in advertising new editions of such books, the disappearance of which word being a sign that times have changed. What happy, careless, noiseless times they were! Lucas, belonging to them, and being a publisher, was able to benefit all bookish pedestrians, and the number of copies of The Open Road scattered among English homes from 1899, when it was first published, until after 1918 must have been incalculable.

One of Lucas's colleagues on The Globe, where he wrote 'By the Way', a column of short humorous paragraphs full of quips and puns, was C. L. Graves; and in collaboration with Graves, whom I never saw (he was for a number of years assistant or literary editor of The Spectator, and was the first man in the world to discover from The Possessed that Dostoevsky was a humorous writer), Lucas wrote a number of squibs which had great vogue between 1901 and 1914, when such things became obsolete.

The first of these squibs to attract attention was Wisdom while you Wait, a skit on the elaborate publicity introduced into England by the American promoters of a new edition of The Encyclopaedia Britannica. The collaborators, copying an American humorist, used all sorts of old wood-blocks and engravings which they pretended to have extracted from something called the Insidecompletuar Britanniaware, and amusingly mocked every grandiose claim of the original. Other, similar, booklets followed, including a skit on the popular Press called Change for a Halfpenny. It was all fooling without serious aim, and extremely like mid-Victorian numbers of Punch; but it made people laugh, as the mid-Victorian Punch did, and it set a fashion. A shilling was easily coaxed from the pocket of a city or suburban homegoer; the two concoctors had fun in doing something easy; they became famous. Graves's wit was both lighter and sharper than Lucas's. He was a very accomplished man.

The anthology was Lucas's forte. Owing to the fact that as a boy he was apprenticed to a Brighton bookseller who had a gigantic circulating library dating back to Regency days, he was familiar with hundreds of neglected or unread books. He shared his knowledge. He was eager to share it. Long before I ever knew him, being in extremis, and capable of only the simplest reading, I wrote suggesting that as Brabourne's edition was inadequate he should collect and re-edit all Jane Austen's letters (this has now been done to perfection by R. W. Chapman). He replied that he had no time for such a task, and as I had mentioned that I was very ill he recommended as ideal reading for a sick person Fanny Kemble's Record of a Girlhood. It was a good deed. Those who know this book and its successors will realize how good it was; those who do not may be glad of Lucas's tip. As he once said, 'The books I like best and can return to [are] the books with the best bedside manners.' Fanny Kemble is not only delightful in herself, but she leads on to other writers who are soothing to convalescents, among them her correspondent Edward FitzGerald.

Lucas's association with Charles Lamb began by chance. In young manhood he was nominated by his ex-schoolmate and continuing friend Wilfred Whitten as the man to write for the Society of Friends a biography of Bernard Barton, the Quaker poet who was a friend of Lamb and whose daughter was astonishingly left to the care of FitzGerald. Not knowing what to do with this unfortunate girl, FitzGerald married her, with the result that they were estranged for life. Lucas met Mrs FitzGerald in the course of his research into Bernard Barton's affairs, and in the same course had the thrilling experience of shaking hands with at least two people who in their day had shaken hands with Lamb. He should have been inspired.

Indeed, he was to some degree inspired; for as one thing naturally leads to another (sometimes it is a good thing; more often a bad one) he was offered a commission to prepare a book called Charles Lamb and the Lloyds. It was not a good book; and when permission to use the letters written by Lamb in Macdonald's edition was refused, and J. M. Dent, thinking to bypass the law of copyright, bought the originals from which he printed, there was unfortunate copyright litigation, in which Lucas was indirectly involved. Subsequent to the publication of Charles Lamb and the Lloyds, but before the litigation, he was invited by Methuen to write an introduction to a new edition of The Essays of Elia. He thus became an accepted 'authority' on a greatly loved writer.

My friend P. P. Howe, who in the matter of Lamb's contemporary, Hazlitt, was letter-perfect, scoffed a little at Lucas's performance; but whether this scoffing arose from loyalty to Hazlitt or from the scholar's disdain of an amateur's imprecision I cannot say. My own scepticism in the same field dated from the time when, aged twenty-one, I plumed myself upon knowing more about Lamb than anybody except William Macdonald. I shall not dwell upon it here.

Lucas was born at Eltham, in Kent, one of seven children in a Quaker family of which the mother was deaf and the father 'a lonely and censorious man'. He read with most relish in modern French literature (modern, that is, in the age before the Second World War), where he sought a wit not then to be found in current English. And although his lesser commentaries on life and travel often wanted force and originality, and his novels had neither shape nor importance, the harsh justice of his mind was shown in the essay "Swinburne at 'The Pines'." There was no more scathing picture of that curious ménage. A similar visit was briefly described by Max, and Richard le Gallienne threw fantastic light upon Swinburne's naughty evasion of his mentor's rules for sobriety; but Lucas was not surpassed. Had he written a whole book in the manner of that essay he would have stood before the world more nearly as he was.

He did not write the book. To have done so would have been to desert pleasant ways and damage the reputation he preferred for good-nature. He ate and drank and talked. When I knew him it was his chief wish to make and keep friends. If he liked a person he would go to extreme trouble to please that person, even (to my distress) putting morsels from his own plate on the plate of his guest, toasting him, and teasing him occasionally by the humorous depreciation of other friends—in my case, Arnold Bennett. If he did not like a person, or found him a bore, he shunned him altogether. He would sometimes endure the company of inferiors for the sake of their affection or their enjoyment of food and wine. Even then he demanded that his palate should be cajoled. At lunch he drank Pouilly and soda-water; at night, always, champagne.

As a publisher's reader he was second only to Edward Garnett; much less serious-minded and paternal than Garnett, much more catholic in his acceptances, less of a zealot, and always willing to recommend for publication meritorious writers whose work he did not personally admire. Methuen had a very long list; and the only novel in it which could be described as 'unpleasant' was Lawrence's The Rainbow, which Algernon Methuen would not defend under threat of prosecution. I do not know how far Lucas was concerned in this venture. I do know that he had a thoroughly good record as adviser, was very wise, shrewd, and far-seeing, and that he would not have sacrificed Lawrence if any other course had been possible.

His unhappiness lay deep in temperament. Writing of him in 1909, Arnold Bennett said: 'Mr Lucas is a highly mysterious man. On the surface he might be mistaken for a mere cricket enthusiast. Dig down, and you will come, with not too much difficulty, to the simple man of letters. Dig further, and, with somewhat more difficulty, you will come to an agreeably ironic critic of human foibles. Try to dig still further, and you will probably encounter rock.' It was not rock; it was a dark and viscous ego. He was too intelligent not to realize that he lacked the genius to invent and the courage to be, in print, as pungent and terrible as he was in mordant reverie. He never for-gave himself for the failure.

Outwardly he was a warm, sentimental lover of dogs and cricket; less sentimentally of literature. Inwardly he was what he showed himself in "Swinburne at 'The Pines'," a hater of people like Theodore Watts-Dunton, who insist on managing other men for their own good. He detested 'managers' and parasites. He was also impatient of slow-thinkers and the respectable. Having seen the rise and fall of generations and reputations, he was sceptical of all who were extolled. He had no living heroes. Carrying in his heart all the unhappiness and pessimism of the disappointed man, he could not bear to read the unhappy and pessimistic works of those who parade their dejection. 'I still want books to be cheerful and amusing,' he once wrote; that is, he needed anodynes. George Meredith was his favourite English novelist; his poets were the pre-Georgians. Hence, in the post-war years, a sign of the times, his loss of fame; but in the earliest of those years he had great influence as one who could back his judgment by publishing what he thought good.