is, paradoxical as it may appear, is combined
with an intense and childish complacency in his own greatness, his
position, his influence, his literary and artistic achievements.

He seems to live a very lonely life, though a full one; every hour of
his day is methodically mapped out. He has a large correspondence, he
reads the papers diligently, he talks, he writes; but he seems to have
no friends and no associates. His criticisms upon art, which are
suggestive enough, are regarded with undisguised contempt by
professional critics; and I find that they are held to be vitiated by a
certain want of balance and proportion, and a whimsical eclecticism of
taste.

But the pathos of the situation is not the opinion which is held of
him, for he is wholly unconscious of it, and he makes up for any lack
of expressed approbation by the earnest and admiring approval of all he
does, which he himself liberally supplies. It is rather a gnawing
hunger of the soul from which he seems to suffer; he has a simply
boundless appetite for the poor thing which he calls recognition--I
shudder to think how often I have heard the word on his lips--and his
own self-approbation is like a drug which he administers to still some
fretting pain.

He has been telling me to-night a long story of machinations against
him in the club; the perspicacity with which he detected them, the
odious repartees he made, the effective counter-checks he applied. "I
was always a combatant," he says, with a leering gaiety. Then the next
moment he is girding at the whole crew for their stupidity, their
ingratitude, their malignity; and it never seems to cross his mind that
he can be, or has been in the smallest degree, to blame. It distressed
me profoundly, and my mind and heart seemed to weep silent tears.

If he had shown tact, prudence, diligence, if he could have held his
tongue when he first took a different place, he would have had a circle
of many friends by now. Instead of this, I find him barely tolerated.
He talks--he has plenty of courage, and no idea of being put down--but
he is listened to with ill-concealed weariness, and, at best, with
polite indifference. Yet every now and then the old spell falls on me,
and I realise what a noble mind is overthrown. He ought to be at this
time the centre of a set of attached friends, a man spoken of with
reverence, believed in, revisited by grateful admirers--a man whom it
would be an honour and a delight to a young m