To avoid the appearance of priggishness, which he dreads with some reason, he even went so far as to procure a herb tobacco, which he smokes with the help of frequent sulphur matches.  This he recommends to us strongly.  “Won’t you try it?” he says, with a winning smile.  “Just once.”  And he is the only man I ever met who drinks that facetious fluid, non-alcoholic beer.  Once he proposed to wean me upon that from my distinctive vice, which led indeed to our first rupture. “I find it delicious,” he said in pathetic surprise.

It is one of his most inveterate habits to tell you quietly what he does, or would do under the circumstances.  Seeing you at Kipling, he will propound the proposition that “all true literature has a distinct aim.”  His test of literary merit is “What good does it do you?” He is a great lender of books, especially of Carlyle and Ruskin, which authors for some absolutely inscrutable reason he considers provocative of Bagarrowism, and he goes to the County Council lectures on dairy-work, because it encourages others to improve themselves.  But I have said enough to display him, and of Bagarrow at least—­as I can well testify—­it is easy to have more than enough.  Indeed, after whole days with him I have gone home to dream of the realisation of his ideals, a sort of Bagarrow millennium, a world of Bagarrows.  All kinds of men—­Falstaffs, Don Quixotes, Alan Stewarts, John the Baptists, John Knoxes, Quilps, and Benvenuto Cellinis—­all, so to speak, Bagarrowed, all with clean cuffs, tight umbrellas, and temperate ways, passing to and fro in a regenerate earth.

And so he goes on his way through this wonderful universe with his eyes fixed upon two or three secondary things, without the lust or pride of life, without curiosity or adventure, a mere timid missionary of a religion of “Nicer Ways,” a quiet setter of a good example.  I can assure you this is no exaggeration, but a portrait.  It seems to me that the thing must be pathological, that he and this goodness of his have exactly the same claim upon Lombroso, let us say, as the born criminal.  He is born good, a congenital good example, a sufferer from atrophy of his original sin.  The only hope I can see for Bagarrow, short of murder, is forcible trepanning.  He ought to have the seat of his ideals lanced, and all this wash about doing good to people by stealth taken away.  It may be he might prove a very decent fellow then—­if there was anything left of him, that is.

THE BOOK OF ESSAYS DEDICATORY

I have been bothered about this book this three months.  I have written scarcely anything since Llewellyn asked me for it, for when he asked me I had really nothing on hand.  I had just published every line I had ever written, at my own expense, with Prigsbys.  Yet three months should suffice for one of Llewellyn’s books, which consist chiefly of decorous fly-leaves and a dedication or so, and margins.  Of course you know Llewellyn’s books—­the most delightful things in the market:  the sweetest covers, with little gilt apples and things carelessly distributed over luminous grey, and bright red initials, and all these delightful fopperies.  But it was the very slightness of these bibelots that disorganised me.  And perhaps, also, the fact that no one has ever asked me for a book before.