He has only been gone an hour, yet I feel as though a month had elapsed since he entered the room, since I was a moderately happy man.  He is a very pleasant fellow to look at, small, trim, well-appointed, courteous, friendly, with a deferential air.  His eyes gleam brightly through his glasses, and he has brisk dexterous gestures.  He was genial enough till he settled down upon literature, and since then what waves and storms have gone over me!  I have or had a grovelling taste for books; I possess a large number, and I thought I had read them.  But I feel now, not so much as if I had read the wrong ones, but as if those I had read were only, so to speak, the anterooms and corridors which led to the really important books—­and of them, it seems, I know nothing.  Epigrams flowed from his tongue, brilliant characterisations, admirable judgments.  He had “placed” every one, and literature to him seemed like a great mosaic in which he knew the position of every cube.  He knew all the movements and tendencies of literature, and books seemed to him to be important, not because they had a message for the mind and heart, but because they illustrated a tendency, or were a connecting link in a chain.  He quoted poems I had never heard of, he named authors I had never read.  He did it all modestly and quietly enough, with no parade, (I want to do him full justice) but with an evidently growing disappointment to find that he had fallen among savages.  I am sure that his conclusion was that authors of popular novels were very shallow, ill-informed people, and I am sure I wholly agreed with him.  Good heavens, what a mind the man had, how stored with knowledge! how admirably equipped!  Nothing that he had ever put away in his memory seemed to have lost its colour or outline; and he knew, moreover, how to lay his hand upon everything.  Indeed, it seemed to me that his mind was like an emporium, with everything in the world arranged on shelves, all new and varnished and bright, and that he knew precisely the place of everything.  I became the prey of hopeless depression; when I tried to join in, I confused writers and dates; he set me right, not patronisingly but paternally.  “Ah, but you will remember,” he said, and “Yes, but we must not overlook the fact that”—­adding, with admirable humility, “Of course these are small points, but it is my business to know them.”  Now I find myself wondering why I disliked knowledge, communicated thus, so much as I did.  It may be envy and jealousy, it may be humiliation and despair.  But I do not honestly think that it is.  I am quite sure I do not want to possess that kind of knowledge.  It is the very sharpness and clearness of outline about it all that I dislike.  The things that he knows have not become part of his mind in any way:  they are stored away there, like walnuts; and I feel that I have been pelted with walnuts, deluged and buried in walnuts.  The things which my visitor knows have undergone no change, they have not been