FEW Americans have ever visited Europe more often purely
for pleasure than William Randolph Hearst, and few Ameri-
cans have derived more pleasure from their trips. Constantly
staying at the most luxurious hotels, financially able to gratify
any whim of the moment, he gave free rein in Europe to his
double passion for spending and for getting. Beautiful, costly, or
unusual objects aroused in him an insatiable zeal for ownership.
Pictures, statuettes, vases, and even mummies followed him back
across the Atlantic to adorn his home at No. 123 Lexington Ave-
nue, once owned by President Chester Arthur. The sellers of
these objects often had to wait long for the payment of their
bills; sometimes this was because Hearst did not happen to have
the ready cash upon his person, but more often it was simply
because they were tradesmen, and it had always been the trades-
man's duty to await the nobleman's leisure in such matters.

Only in England was Hearst unhappy. There he was deliber-
ately snubbed by the "best families" and in countless ways that
the British know so well how to use he was made to feel that he
was only a counterfeit aristocrat. The whole country seemed to
him a kind of Harvard on a large scale and with more rigorous
laws. On one occasion he is said to have been arrested for some
minor escapade, and to have been much irritated by the London
bobby's strange insensitiveness to offers that any New York
policeman would have welcomed with alacrity. His earlier
Anglomania gave way to a permanent Anglophobia, first publicly
expressed at the time of Queen Victoria's death in 1901 when

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