With this, my journalistic fledgling gave way to Homeric laughter, and helped himself anew to wine. And since that day, since that witching hour, I have watched his wild career. I track him in the magazines; I recognise the ebullitions of his wit in "society" paragraphs; I discover his withering, blistering sarcasm in his reviews of the books he never reads; in fact, I find him everywhere. As the air permeates space, he permeates literature. He is the all-sure, the all-wise, the all-conquering one. With such a faith as his, so firmly held, so nobly uttered, he is born to authority. I only wish some one would make him Prime Minister. Everything that is wrong would be righted, and with a Journalist (and such a journalist!) at the head of affairs, all questions of government would be as easy to settle as child's play. He himself--the Journalist--implies as much, and with all the fibres of my soul I believe him! IX. OF WRITERS IN GROOVES. There are a certain class of authors who remind me of a certain class of gamblers--men who believe in a special "lucky number," and are always staking their largest amounts upon it. To speak more plainly, I should say that I mean the "groovy" men, who, as soon as they find one particular sort of "style" that chances to hit the taste of the public, keep on grinding away at it with the remorselessness of an Italian street-organ player. I see lots of such fellows in the crowd around me, and I know most of them personally. For instance, there is William Black, a distinctly "groovy" man if ever there was one. All his books are like brothers and sisters, bearing a strong family resemblance one to another. If you have read "A Princess of Thule" and "A Daughter of Heth" you have got the _crême de la crême_ of all that was or is in him. The rest of his work is evolved from precisely the same substance as is found in these two books, only it is drawn out into various criss-cross threads of deft weaving; and, deft as it is, it makes uncommonly thin material. In his latter novels, indeed, there is so much of what may be justly termed "feminine twaddle," that one has to look back to the title-page in order to convince one's self that it is really one of the "virile" sex who is telling a story. Excellent Willie! With his small head and inoffensive physiognomy, he suggests an intellectual sort of pint-pot, out of which it would be absurd to expect a quart of brain. Inasmuch as a pint-pot can only hold a pint; so let us be grateful for small mercies. And let us admire, not for the first time either, the persistent kindly confidence of the British Public, who steadily take up Willie's novels, one after the other, in the sanguine faith of finding something new therein. "Some day," says the patient B.P. in its trot to and from Mudie's Library--"some day Willie will give us a book without a sunset in it. Some day, by happy chance, he will forget there exists such a thing as a yacht. And some