Abandoning thought for the moment, he wrote on. He paused again toward the end of the seventh month, and once more patiently reviewed the whole. This time he found four distinct threads that did not seem to meet; but still more puzzling was the apparent absence of any individual flavour. He was staggered. Before all he prized that quality, and throughout his career had fostered it in himself. To be unsapped in whim or fancy, to be independent, had been the very salt of his existence as a critic. And now, and now--when his hour had struck, and he was in the very throes of that long-deferred creation, to find----! He put thought away again, and doggedly wrote on. At the end of the ninth month, in a certain exaltation, he finished; and slowly, with intense concentration, looked at what he had produced from beginning to end. And as he looked something clutched at him within and he felt frozen. The thing did not move, it had no pulse, no breath, no colour--it was dead. And sitting there before that shapeless masterpiece, still-born, without a spirit or the impress of a personality, a horrid thought crept and rattled in his brain. Had he, in his independence, in his love of being a law unto himself, _become so individual that he had no individuality left_? Was it possible that he had judged, and judged, and--not been judged, too long? It was not true--not true! Locking the soft and flavourless thing away, he took up the latest novel sent him, and sat down to read it. But, as he read, the pages of his own work would implant themselves above those that he turned and turned. At last he put the book down, and took up pen to review it. “This novel,” he wrote, “is that most pathetic thing, the work of a man who has burned the lamp till the lamp has burned him; who has nourished and cultured his savour, and fed his idiosyncrasies, till he has dried and withered, without savour left.” And, having written that damnation of the book that was not his own, the blood began once more flowing in his veins, and he felt warm. III.--THE PLAIN MAN He was plain. It was his great quality. Others might have graces, subtleties, originality, fire, and charm; they had not his plainness. It was that which made him so important, not only in his country’s estimation, but in his own. For he felt that nothing was more valuable to the world than for a man to have no doubts, and no fancies, but to be quite plain about everything. And the knowledge that he was looked up to by the press, and pulpit, and the politician sustained him in the daily perfecting of that unique personality which he shared with all other plain men. In an age which bred so much that was freakish and peculiar, to know that there was always himself with his sane and plain outlook to fall back on, was an extraordinary comfort to him. He knew that he could rely on his own judgment, and never scrupled to give it to a public which never tired of asking for it.