e covered
two whole pages with writing which has now been converted into ashes
among the logs upon my hearth. For the covering of those pages two
volumes had been fingered and referred to, if you please, and my
faulty memory drawn upon for yet a third quotation. So much for the
habit of literary allusiveness, engrained into one by years of
book-making, and yet more surely, I suspect, by labour for hire on the
newspaper press.

But, though I have detected and removed these two pages of
irrelevance, I foresee that unessential and therefore obscurantic
matter will creep in. Well, when I come to weigh the completed record,
I must allow for that; and, meanwhile, so far as time and my own
limitations as selector permit, I will prune and clear away from the
line of vision these weeds of errant fancy. For the record must of all
things be honest and comprehensive; rather than shapely, effective, or
literary. To be sure the pundits would say that this is to misuse and
play with words; to perpetrate a contradiction in terms. Well, we
shall see. Whatever the critics might say, your author by profession
would understand me well enough when I say: 'Honest, rather than
literary.'

How, to begin with, may I label and describe my present self? There,
immediately, I am faced with one of the difficulties of this task. One
can say of most men that they are this or that; of this class, order,
sect, party, or type; and, behold them neatly docketed! But in all
honesty I cannot say that I am of any special class, or that I
'belong' anywhere in particular. There is no circle in any community
which is indefeasibly my own by right of birth and training. I am
still a member of two London clubs, I believe. They were never more
than hotels for me. I am probably what most folk call a gentleman; but
how much does that signify in the twentieth century? Many simple
people would likely call me a person of education, even of learning,
belike, seeing a list of books under my name. A schoolman who examined
me would be pardoned (by me, at all events) for calling me an
ignoramus of no education whatever. For--and this I never reflected
upon until the present moment--I could not for the life of me
'analyse' the simplest sentence, in the rather odd scholastic sense of
that word. Inherited instinct and long practice make me aware, I
believe, of an error in syntax, when I chance upon one. But I could
only tell you that it was wrong, and never how or why. I kno