ey have no more reticence in his
presence than if he were the butler. He has belonged to no cliques,
and thereby escaped the greatest peril which can beset the student of
human nature. A man of genius, indeed, in these days is almost
certain, sooner or later, to become the centre of a mutual admiration
society; but the person I have in my mind is no genius, nor anything
like one, and he thanks Heaven for it. To an opinion of his own he
does not pretend, but his views upon the opinions of other people he
believes to be infallible. I have called him dogmatic, but that does
not at all express the absolute certainty with which he delivers
judgment. 'I know no more,' he says, 'about the problems of human life
than you do' (taking me as an illustration of the lowest prevailing
ignorance), 'but I know what everybody is thinking about them.' He is
didactic, and therefore often dull, and will eventually, no doubt,
become one of the greatest bores in Great Britain. At present,
however, he is worth knowing; and I propose to myself to be his
Boswell, and to introduce him--or, at least, his views--to other
people. I have entitled them the Midway Inn, partly from my own
inveterate habit of story-telling, but chiefly from an image of his
own, by which he once described to me, in his fine egotistic rolling
style, the position he seemed to himself to occupy in the world.

When I was a boy, he said (which I don't believe he ever was), I
had a long journey to take between home and school. Exactly midway
there was a hill with an Inn upon it, at which we changed horses.
It was a point to which I looked forward with very different
feelings when going and returning. In the one case--for I hated
school--it seemed to frown darkly on me, and from that spot the
remainder of the way was dull and gloomy; in the other case, the
sun seemed always glinting on it, and the rest of the road was as a
fair avenue that leads to Paradise. The innkeeper received us with
equal hospitality on both occasions, and it was quite evident did
not care one farthing in which direction we were tending. He would
stand in front of his house, jingling his money--_our_ money--in
his pockets, and watch us depart with the greatest serenity,
whether we went east or west. I thought him at one time the most
genial of Bonifaces (for it was his profession to wear a smile),
and at another a mere mocker of human woe. When I grew up, I
perceived tha