The burden of his song is the lack of that due recognition which he ought to receive; and this, 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 man to know; and the setting in which he lives is precisely adapted to this role.  Instead of which it may safely be said that, if he were to announce his departure from town, it would be received with general and cordial satisfaction by his fellow-clubmen.

Even if he had not his circle, he might live a quiet, tranquil, and laborious life in surroundings which are simple and yet dignified.