Where he failed most of all was in his inability to suffer fools gladly: he hated "sloppy" work either in colleague or boy; if he had only kept his hatred to himself, it might have been all right, but he was too honest, too impetuous. He would blurt out his natural feelings everywhere and expect everybody to see his point of view at once. Considering all things his colleagues were in some ways extremely long-suffering, for he was so sensitive that out of sheer nervousness and ineffectual anger he would show his worst side and hide his better nature. He must have seemed to those who only knew him superficially to be one mass of contradictions. Take, for instance, his reading. He seems to have read everything of any note that appeared during these eight years, but his judgments on current writers are ludicrous: he hails any new-comer as a great genius, and yet at the same time he had a nice and exact taste in English literature and in talking could tell you just the strong and weak points of all big writers. In his written criticism he seems to have no standards at all. As he himself says, he was like a motor-car without brakes. His motor-power was very high, but he had no control over it: consequently he was always running away with himself and finishing up with incredible smashes whenever he started out on a literary or educational excursion. I have been going through his letters to me of late, but I have not found any clue in them to the mania which has led to his downfall. In the diary, on the other hand, he lets himself go; the constant friction, the unrealized ideals find expression: on the surface, in his letters to his friends, he was charmingly lighthearted and humorous. One would never suspect the _sæva indignatio_ which was ultimately to be his undoing, in anything but his published works.