With this, my journalistic fledgling gave way to Homeric laughter, and helped himself anew to wine. And since that day, since that witching hour, I have watched his wild career. I track him in the magazines; I recognise the ebullitions of his wit in "society" paragraphs; I discover his withering, blistering sarcasm in his reviews of the books he never reads; in fact, I find him everywhere. As the air permeates space, he permeates literature. He is the all-sure, the all-wise, the all-conquering one. With such a faith as his, so firmly held, so nobly uttered, he is born to authority. I only wish some one would make him Prime Minister. Everything that is wrong would be righted, and with a Journalist (and such a journalist!) at the head of affairs, all questions of government would be as easy to settle as child's play. He himself—the Journalist-implies as much, and with all the fibres of my soul I believe him! IX. OF WRITERS IN GROOVES. 66 THERE are a certain class of authors who remind me of a certain class of gamblers-men who believe in a special "lucky number," and are always staking their largest amounts upon it. To speak more plainly, I should say that I mean the groovy men, who, as soon as they find one particular sort of "style" that chances to hit the taste of the public, keep on grinding away at it with the remorselessness of an Italian street-organ player. I see lots of such fellows in the crowd around me, and I know most of them personally. For instance, there is William Black, a distinctly 66 groovy" man if ever there was one. All his books are like brothers and sisters, bearing a |