John Morley, who ought to know, has expressed some doubt as to whether journalism tends to special elevation of character. There are cases where the doubt does not arise. When the critic, on artistic, and therefore on public, grounds, and with due store of knowledge, raises a fury by his condemnations, and when the editor, who has to think of his paper and its standing, supports the critic, believing him likely to be right, that is a good evening's work. The scope therefore granted to Johnstone as a journalist by his editor was a proof of sagacity, for he became a power in the musical community, not only of Manchester but of the larger region the _Manchester Guardian_ reaches. No doubt, though he was allowed as free a hand in expressing his opinions as any other of his craft, and a much freer one than the majority, he sometimes wearied of the necessary restrictions of a journalist's position and their deadening effect upon the mind. An outburst, expressive of a deep and recurring mood, occurs in a letter of January, 1902, written on his return to Manchester, and describing a day he had spent in London with York Powell. "There is now no one in this neighbourhood with whom I can _converse_. I find myself permanently in the journalistic attitude, regarding it as luck if I can say two per cent. of what I think about anything; so the meeting with Powell was an oasis at the end of some very sandy months." This complaint was laid not against the paper he served, but against the sparseness of the kind of society he liked best. To understand it some curious features of life in Manchester must be recalled. He used at times to come to a small society of friends, which lasted for eight or nine years, and met during the business year at about monthly intervals, at the members' dwellings, for free conversation. He is remembered as having there discoursed on Tolstoy's conceptions of art with his usual energy and elaboration. The stringent mad-logic of the great art-hater had once attracted, but at last disgusted him, and he saw that even Tolstoy's famed novels, with their show of godlike equity, really held the seed of his later prejudices against science, art, and sexual love. But such occasions when he could talk freely seemed to grow rarer. The fault lay somewhat, no doubt, in his own radical solitariness of mind, but also in the surrounding conditions.