There may have been some lesser interruptions during the talk I have reported as if it was a set speech, but this was the drift of what I said and should have said if the other man, in the Review I referred to, had not seen fit to meddle with the subject, as some fellow always does, just about the time when I am going to say something about it.  The old Master listened beautifully, except for cutting in once, as I told you he did.  But now he had held in as long as it was in his nature to contain himself, and must have his say or go off in an apoplexy, or explode in some way.—­I think you’re right about the poets,—­he said.—­They are to common folks what repeaters are to ordinary watches.  They carry music in their inside arrangements, but they want to be handled carefully or you put them out of order.  And perhaps you must n’t expect them to be quite as good timekeepers as the professional chronometer watches that make a specialty of being exact within a few seconds a month.  They think too much of themselves.  So does everybody that considers himself as having a right to fall back on what he calls his idiosyncrasy.  Yet a man has such a right, and it is no easy thing to adjust the private claim to the fair public demand on him.  Suppose you are subject to tic douloureux, for instance.  Every now and then a tiger that nobody can see catches one side of your face between his jaws and holds on till he is tired and lets go.  Some concession must be made to you on that score, as everybody can see.  It is fair to give you a seat that is not in the draught, and your friends ought not to find fault with you if you do not care to join a party that is going on a sleigh-ride.  Now take a poet like Cowper.  He had a mental neuralgia, a great deal worse in many respects than tic douloureux confined to the face.  It was well that he was sheltered and relieved, by the cares of kind friends, especially those good women, from as many of the burdens of life as they could lift off from him.  I am fair to the poets,—­don’t you agree that I am?

Why, yes,—­I said,—­you have stated the case fairly enough, a good deal as I should have put it myself.

Now, then,—­the Master continued,—­I ’ll tell you what is necessary to all these artistic idiosyncrasies to bring them into good square human relations outside of the special province where their ways differ from those of other people.  I am going to illustrate what I mean by a comparison.  I don’t know, by the way, but you would be disposed to think and perhaps call me a wine-bibber on the strength of the freedom with which I deal with that fluid for the purposes of illustration.  But I make mighty little use of it, except as it furnishes me an image now and then, as it did, for that matter, to the Disciples and their Master.  In my younger days they used to bring up the famous old wines, the White-top, the Juno, the Eclipse, the Essex Junior, and the rest, in their old cobwebbed, dusty bottles.