The newer journalism, however, set many of the fashions that still prevail to-day. It broke up the old anonymity of the Press. Few people would have been able at that time to say who edited _The Times_, _The Standard_, or _The Morning Post_, who wrote those charming things on golf and Shakespeare and the musical glasses, or who was responsible for exalting “The Bells” or decrying “Ghosts.” But everybody knew that Mr. T. P. O’Connor started _The Star_, that Mr. Bernard Shaw “did” the music for it, that Mr. A. B. Walkley “did” the drama, and that Mr. Ernest Parke, after a very short time, inherited Mr. O’Connor’s mantle. The name of Mr. Parke at once suggests what was perhaps the feature which most strongly differentiated the journalism of the early Nineties, new or old, from that which was seen clearly to be most successful at the end of the decade. I mean its unashamed preaching, its conviction that it had a mission, and its content to risk being a bore if only the mission could succeed. Ernest Parke was—I speak of him in the past tense, though he happily remains in the present, because, while he is still hale and vigorous, his massive and once golden head is no longer a common object of the Fleet Street landscape—a journalist of a type now hardly existent. To begin with, he was an extraordinary judge of ability of any kind, and managed to surround himself, at singularly low cost for the most part to his principals, with young men who have since either earned distinction in letters or have gone to form the _cadres_ of all the chief newspaper staffs of London. In the second place he contrived to maintain all the realities of the sternest discipline with all the forms of anarchy. The shyest new arrival soon fell into the habit of calling him by his surname, and making jokes (not excluding practical jokes) at his expense. Yet the terror of being found out by him in any slackness or stupidity lay on the oldest inhabitant as much as on the rawest recruit. He contrived to give the journalistic calling all the zest of a joke with all the earnestness of a religious vocation. His interests were singularly wide. Himself very far removed from the scholarly, he had the keenest appreciation of all the newest things in literature and the arts, and there was no better rough judge of good, sound writing. On the other hand, he had the capacity of feeling deeply on all sorts of odd things to which the bookish man is commonly indifferent. He could work himself up—or perhaps he did not need working up—into a state of frenzy over the “guzzling” and junketing propensities of various public or semi-public bodies in the City of London. He waged deadly war against all ill-treatment of animals. A workhouse “scandal” would move him to extraordinary indignation. A police court sentence which appealed to him as unjust or cruel would rouse all the generous Quixote as well as all the original savage in him. But he did not, by any means, think parochially—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that, if he thought parochially, he made the whole world his parish. Something happening in Russia would excite him no less, in given circumstances, than something happening in Mile End. He kept his eye as vigilantly on the iniquity of the Turk as on the shiftiness of a minor Minister or the advertisements of a bucket-shop fraud. The memory of his long duel with the Rockefellers over “low-flash oil” still lingers with the older inhabitants of Fleet Street. I happened to be out of England for some years while this crusade was proceeding. My last uncloudy impression of the Old Country was a placard at Southampton with some such words as “Nearing Victory over Low-Flash,” and my first clear impression on my return was another placard at Tilbury (a rather depressed-looking and washed-out placard) bearing the legend “Another Low-Flash Horror—How long, Oh Lord, how long?”—or words to that effect.