He is a young man of method; young men do not arrive without method at the condition of being encyclopædias; his watch is as correct as his judgments. He breakfasts at eight sharp, and his housekeeper sets the kitchen clock five minutes fast, for he is a terrible Ivan at breakfast. He glances at a couple of newspapers, first at the list of "publications received," and then at the news. Of course he is not hoodwinked by newspapers. He will meet the foreign editor of the "Daily ----" at lunch and will learn the true inwardness of that exploded canard from Berlin. Having assessed the newspapers, he may interpret to his own satisfaction a movement from a Mozart piano sonata, and then he will brush his hat, pick up sundry books, and pass sedately to the station. The station-master is respectfully cordial, and quite ready to explain to him the secret causation of delays, for his season-ticket is a white one. He gets into a compartment with a stockbroker, a lawyer, or a tea-merchant, and immediately falls to work; he does his minor reviewing in the train, fostering or annihilating reputations while the antique engine burrows beneath the squares of the West End; but his brain is not so fully occupied that he cannot spare a corner of it to meditate upon the extraordinary ignorance and simplicity of stockbrokers, lawyers, and tea-merchants. He reaches his office, and for two or three hours practises that occupation of watching other people work which is called editing: a process always of ordering, of rectifying, of laying down the law, of being looked up to, of showing how a thing ought to be done and can be done, of being flattered and cajoled, of dispensing joy or gloom--in short, the Jupiter and Shah of Persia business. He then departs, as to church, to his grill-room, where for a few moments himself and the cook hold an anxious consultation to decide which particular chop or which particular steak out of a mass of chops and steaks shall have the honour of sustaining him till tea-time. The place is full of literary shahs and those about to be shahs. They are all in the movement; they constitute the movement. They ride the comic-opera whirlwinds of public opinion and direct the tea-cup storms of popularity. The young man classes most of them with the stockbroker, the lawyer, and the tea-merchant. With a few he fraternises, and these few save their faces by appreciating the humour of the thing. Soon afterwards he goes home, digging _en route_ the graves of more reputations, and, surrounded by the two thousand volumes, he works in seclusion at his various activities that he may triumph openly. He descends to dinner stating that he has written so many thousand words, and excellent words too--stylistic, dramatic, tender, witty. There may be a theatrical first-night toward, in which case he returns to town and sits in the seat of the languid for a space. Or he stays within doors and discusses with excessively sophisticated friends the longevity of