The altar fire by A.C. Benson

Another visitor! I am not sure that his visit is not a more distinguished testimonial than any I have yet received. He is a young Don with a very brilliant record indeed. He wrote to ask if he might have the honour of calling, and renewing a very slight acquaintance. He came and conquered. I am still crushed and battered by his visit. I feel like a land that has been harried by an invading army. Let me see if, dizzy and unmanned as I am, I call recall some of the incidents of his visit. He has only been gone an hour, yet I feel as though a month had elapsed since he entered the room, since I was a moderately happy man. He is a very pleasant fellow to look at, small, trim, well-appointed, courteous, friendly, with a deferential air. His eyes gleam brightly through his glasses, and he has brisk dexterous gestures.

He was genial enough till he settled down upon literature, and since then what waves and storms have gone over me! I have or had a grovelling taste for books; I possess a large number, and I thought I had read them. But I feel now, not so much as if I had read the wrong ones, but as if those I had read were only, so to speak, the anterooms and corridors which led to the really important books -- and of them, it seems, I know nothing. Epigrams flowed from his tongue, brilliant characterisations, admirable judgments. He had "placed" every one, and literature to him seemed like a great mosaic in which he knew the position of every cube. He knew all the movements and tendencies of literature, and books seemed to him to be important, not because they had a message for the mind and heart, but because they illustrated a tendency, or were a connecting link in a chain. He quoted poems I had never heard of, he named authors I had never read.