I can't express to you the poignant distress which my visit has caused me; not exactly a personal distress, for Hardy is not a man to be directly pitied; but the pathos of the whole thing is very great. His house has large and beautiful rooms, and I recognised many of the little treasures--portraits, engravings, statuettes, busts, and books--which used to adorn the house in Half Moon Street. But the man himself! He has altered very little in personal appearance. He still moves briskly, and, except that his hair is nearly white, I could imagine him to be the same hero that I used to worship. But his egoism has grown upon him to such an extent that his mind is hardly recognisable. He still talks brilliantly and suggestively at times; and I find myself every now and then amazed by some stroke of genius in his talk, some familiar thing shown in a new and interesting light, some ray of poetry or emotion thrown on to some dusty and well-known subject. But he has become a man of grievances; he still has, at the beginning of a talk, some of the fine charm of sympathy. He will begin by saying that he wants to know what one thinks of a point, and he will smile in the old affectionate kind of way, as one might smile at a favourite child; but he will then plunge into a fiery monologue about his ambitions and his work. He declaims away, with magnificent gestures. He still interlards his talk with personal appeals for approbation, for concurrence, for encouragement; but it is clear he does not expect an answer, and his demands for sympathy have little more personal value than the reiterated statement in the Litany that we are miserable sinners has in the mouth of many respectable church-goers. The result is that I find myself greatly fatigued by my visit. I have spent several hours of every day in his society, and I do not suppose that I have uttered a dozen consecutive words; yet many of his statements would be well worth discussing, if he were capable of discussion. The burden of his song is the lack of that due recognition which he ought to receive; and this, paradoxical as it may appear, is combined with an intense and childish complacency in his own greatness, his position, his influence, his literary and artistic achievements. He seems to live a very lonely life, though a full one; every hour of his day is methodically mapped out. He has a large correspondence, he reads the papers diligently, he talks, he writes; but he seems to have no friends and no associates. His criticisms upon art, which are suggestive enough, are regarded with undisguised contempt by professional critics; and I find that they are held to be vitiated by a certain want of balance and proportion, and a whimsical eclecticism of taste.