But it was hard for a cosmopolitan person like Arthur Johnstone, at once deeply bent on art and beauty of all kinds, and also demanding some kind of cheerful foreign life in the intervals of work, to find his account quickly in his new abode, and the opinion of it we have recorded above is largely his own. For some time, therefore, he felt that Manchester was admirable rather than refreshing. It had found for him the work of his life; he soon became a force in his own calling; he had friends, new as well as old, in the place; and he liked it better, as time passed, and as he managed to find some of the intelligent festiveness that he wanted. Gradually he touched several quite different circles, chiefly doubtless the musical, but others also, journalistic, academic, and professional. Except with a few, Johnstone made his way somewhat slowly in society. He could be outspoken, uncompromising, and even explosive (though he never attacked unless he thought there was provocation). These characteristics and his daring line as a critic, both in talk and print, caused him to be under-estimated by some otherwise intelligent persons. He might have said, with Saint-Simon, that he was not "un sujet académique." He disliked dons as a class; at Oxford and elsewhere they made him, of course wrongly, restive. He had not been through their mill, and they did not always care for or see his curious and original play of mind. Their committee-trained caution of phrase was alarmed by his emphasis and heavy-shotted superlatives, which merely amused his friends. There were, of course, those among them who liked him well. In some houses he had, apart from his musical gifts, a certain name for being "clever and spiky." The latter epithet was only partially true, for he was simple-hearted and good-natured the moment that the occasion arose. "His sympathy," writes Madame de Navarro (Miss Mary Anderson), "never failed, and his unaffected love and enthusiasm for the good, the true, and the beautiful, could always be counted upon." All who had eyes saw this in Johnstone, but all had not eyes. He was interested, absorbed, whelmed in his subject, and thought instinctively more about ideas and purposes than about persons, so that he sometimes ignored persons and therefore dissatisfied them. He also said, what is true, that of the provinces, as compared with the capital, "the favourite sin is cowardice." This, and any semblance of snobbery, he openly despised. He liked to have power and weight--and was right in liking it--in order to carry out certain musical reforms. But he dismissed at once anyone who, as he put it, "may be very well-informed, yet clearly cares nothing at all for things in themselves, but simply and solely to be a person of consideration." So, except as a musical critic, his measure, for good reasons, was not invariably taken. He knew this fact, and felt it with some keenness, but not from the side of disappointed conceit. He thought it was his lot in