iety, and felt himself a kind
of charlatan.

The fact is, the general talk of such men was often apt to be over
his head, as it would have been over mine, and often made him
painfully diffident and shy. He needn't have been; he little knew
the kind of feeling he inspired among the highest and best.

Why, one day at the Marathonaeum, the first and foremost of them
all, the champion smiter of the Philistines, the apostle of culture
and sweetness and light, told me that, putting Barty's books out of
the question, he always got more profit and pleasure out of Barty's
society than that of any man he knew.

"It does me good to be in the same room with him; the freshness of
the man, his voice, his aspect, his splendid vitality and
mother-wit, his boyish spirit, and the towering genius behind it
all. I only wish to goodness I was an intimate friend of his as you
are; it would be a liberal education to me!"

But Barty's reverence and admiration for true scholarship and great
literary culture in others amounted to absolute awe, and filled him
with self-distrust.

There is no doubt that until he was universally accepted, the
crudeness of his literary method was duly criticised with great
severity by those professional literary critics who sometimes carp
with such a big mouth at their betters, and occasionally kill the
Keatses of this world!

In writing, as in everything else, he was an amateur, and more or
less remained one for life; but the greatest of his time accepted
him at once, and laughed and wept, and loved him for his obvious
faults as well as for his qualities. Tous les genres sont bons,
hormis le genre ennuyeux! And Barty was so delightfully the reverse
of a bore!

Dear me! what matters it how faultlessly we paint or write or sing
if no one will care to look or read or listen? He is all fault that
hath no fault at all, and we poor outsiders all but yawn in his face
for his pains.

They should only paint and write and sing for each other, these
impeccables, who so despise success and revile the successful. How
do they live, I wonder? Do they take in each other's washing, or
review each other's books?

It edifies one to see what a lot of trouble these deriders of other
people's popularity will often take to advertise themselves, and how
they yearn for that popular acclaim they so scornfully denounce.

Barty was not a well-read man by any means; his scholarship was that
of an idle French boy who leaves schoo