It would be too easy to explain the man as a mere mass of opposition, though it is certain that the greater part of his enthusiasms, if enthusiasms they were, were aroused by the spectacle of some universally received opinion. It would be truer to say that he was ever ready to use his quick and not untrained intelligence in defence of chance likes and dislikes which, when he had so defended them for a sufficient time, took on in his mind a curious and unnatural hardness that sometimes approached and sometimes passed the line of complete conviction. On some points, indeed, he had been compelled to retreat. His theory that the English Press was not the property of its ostensible owners but was subsidised by a mysterious gang of foreign financiers, he discreetly dropped on finding it untenable, though for years he had startled his new acquaintances and wearied his relatives by various aspects of that particular piece of nonsense; and his repeated assertion that Japanese torpedo boats had really been present on the Dogger Bank during the deplorable incident of 1904, he had been singularly silent about after the delivery of the Paris award: but the most part of his follies survived. He did at least pick up a new mania from time to time, which relieved the tedium of his repeated dogmatisings; but his friends looked forward with horror to that inevitable phase which he must meet with advancing years, when the elasticity of his fanaticism should fail him, and they should be compelled to listen to an unvarying tale throughout his old age. He was, as I have said, not fifty, but that phase seemed already arrived in one particular. He had gone mad upon the Hebrew race. He saw Jews everywhere: he not only saw them everywhere, but he saw them all in conspiracy. He would not perhaps have told you that the conspiracy was conscious, but its effects he would have discovered all the same. According to him Lombroso was a Jew, Mr. Roosevelt's friends and supporters the Belmonts were Jews, half the moneyed backers of Roosevelt were Jews, the famous critic Brandes was a Jew, Zola was a Jew, Nordau was a Jew, Witte was a Jew--or in some mysterious way connected with Jews; Naquet was a Jew; the great and suffering Hertz was a Jew. All actors and actresses _en bloc_, and all the foreign correspondents he could lay hands on were Jews; the late and highly respected M. de Blowitz (a fervent Catholic!) he nicknamed "Opper," and having found that a member of the very excellent West Country family of Wilbraham had ardently supported the Russian revolutionists in the columns of the _Times_, he must say, forsooth, that a certain "Brahms" (who rapidly developed into "Abrahams") was the inspirer of the premier journal; and this mythical character so wrought upon his imagination that in a little while the manager of the paper itself, and heaven knows who else, were attached to the Synagogue.