The Notting Hill houses were large, but they did not immediately succeed in enticing the very richest Londoners, who tended to live closer to the centre of London in Mayfair or Belgravia. The houses appealed to the upper middle class, who could live there in Belgravia style at lower prices. In the opening chapter of John Galsworthy's "Forsyte Saga" novels, he housed the Nicholas Forsytes "in Ladbroke Grove, a spacious abode and a great bargain". In 1862 Thomas Hardy left Dorchester for London to work with architect Arthur Blomfield; during this period he lived in Westbourne Park Villas. He immersed himself in the city's literary and cultural life, studying art, visiting the National Gallery, attending the theatre and writing prose and poetry. His first published story, "How I Built Myself a House", appeared in "Chamber's Journal" in 1865. Here he wrote his first―but never published―novel, "The Poor Man and the Lady", in 1867, and the poem "A Young Man's Exhortation," from which Graham Greene took an epigraph for his own novel "The Comedians". Arthur Machen (1863–1947), the author of many supernatural and fantastic fictions, lived at 23 Clarendon Road, Notting Hill Gate, in the 1880s; he writes of his life here in his memoirs "Far Off Things" (1922) and "Things Near and Far" (1923). His mystical work "The Hill of Dreams" (1907, though written ten years earlier) has scenes set in Notting Hill; it is here that the protagonist Lucian Taylor encounters the beautiful bronze-haired prostitute who will later connive at his death.