 section 18 of my first book by various authors. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Ruth Golding. Cavalry Life by John Strange Winter Mrs Arthur Stannard. My first book, as ever was, was written, or to speak quite correctly, was printed, on the nursery floor some thirty-odd years ago. I remember the making of the book very well. The leaves were made from an old copy book, and the back was a piece of stiff paper, sewed in place, and carefully cut down to the right size. So far as I remember, it was about three soldiers and a pig. I don't quite know how the pig came in, but that is a mere detail. I have no data to go upon, as I did not dream thirty years ago that I should ever be so known to fame as to be asked to write the true history of my first book. But I have a wonderful memory, and to the best of my recollection it was, as I say, about three soldiers and a pig. It never saw the light, and there are times when I feel thankful to a gracious providence that I have been spared the power of gratifying the temptation to give birth to those early efforts, after the manner of Sir Edwin Landstier and that pathetic little childish drawing of two sheep, which is to be seen at provincial exhibitions of pictures, for the encouragement and example of the rising generation. So far as I can recall, I made no efforts for some years to woo fickle fortune after the attempt to recount the story of the three soldiers and a pig. But when I was about fourteen, my heart was fired by the example of a school fellow, one Josephine H, who spent a large portion of her time writing stories, or, as our schoolmistress put it, wasting time and spoiling paper. All the same Josephine H's stories were very good, and I have often wondered since those days whether she, in afterlife, went on with her favorite pursuits. I have never heard of her again except once, and then somebody told me that she had married a clergyman and lived at West Hartley Pool. Yes, all this has something to do, and very materially, with the story of my first book. For in emulating Josephine H, whom I was very fond of, and whom I admired immensely, I discovered that I could write myself, or at least that I wanted to write, and that I had ideas that I wanted to see on paper. Without that gentle stimulant, however, I might never have found out that I might one day be able to do something in the same way myself. My next try was at a joint story, a story written by three girls, myself and two friends. That was in the same year. We really made considerable headway with that story, and had visions of completely finishing it and getting no less a sum than thirty pounds for it. I have a sort of an idea that I supplied most of the framework for the story, and that the elder of my collaborators filled in the millinery and the love-making. But, alas, for the futility of human hopes and desires, that book was destined never to be finished, for I had a violent quarrel with my collaborators, and we have never spoken to each other from that day to this. So came to an untimely end my second serious attempt at writing a book. For the stories that I had written in emulation of Josephine H. were only short ones, and were mostly unfinished. I wasted a terrible deal of paper between my second try and my seventeenth birthday, and I believe that I was at that time one of the most hopeless trials of my father's life. He many times offered to provide me with as much cheap paper as I liked to have, but cheap paper did not satisfy my artistic soul, for I always liked the best of everything. Good paper was my weakness, as it was his, and I used it or wasted it, which you will, with just the same lavish hand as I had done a foretime. When I was seventeen I did a skit on a little book called How to Live on Sixpence a Day. It was my first soldier story, accepting the original three soldiers and a pig, and introduced the Sixpence a Day pamphlet into a smart cavalry regiment, whose officers were in various degrees of debt and difficulty, and every man was a barefaced portrait without the smallest attempt at concealment of his identity. Eventually this sketch was printed in a York paper, and the honour of seeing myself in print was considered enough reward for me. I, on the contrary, had no such pure love of fame. I had done what I considered a very smart sketch, and I thought it well worth payment of some kind, which it certainly was. After this I spent a year abroad, improving my mind, and I think on the whole it will be best to draw a veil over that portion of my literary history, for I went out to dinner on every possible occasion, and had a good time, generally. Stay! Did I not say my literary history? Well, that year had a good deal to do with my literary history, for I wrote stories most of the time during a large part of my working hours, and during the whole of my spare time, when I did not happen to be going out to dinner. And when I came home I worked on just the same, until towards the end of seventy-five I drew blood for the first time. Oh, the joy of that first bit of money! My first earnings! And it was but a bit a mere scrap. To be explicit it amounted to ten shillings. I went and bought a watch on the strength of it, not a very costly affair, a matter of two pounds ten and an old silver turnip that I had by me. It was wonderful how that one-half sovereign opened up my ideas. I looked into the future as far as I could see, and I saw myself earning an income. For at that time of day I had acquired no artistic feelings at all, and I genuinely wanted to make name and fame and money. I saw myself a young woman who could make a couple of hundred pounds from one novel, and I gloried in the prospect. I disposed of a good many stories in the same quarter at starvation prices, ranging from the original ten shillings to thirty-five. Then, after a patient year of this not very luxurious work, I made a step forward, and got a story accepted by the dear old family Herald. Oh yes, this is really all relevant to my first book, very much so indeed, for it was through Mr. William Stevens, one of the proprietors of the family Herald, that I learned to know the meaning of the word caution, a word absolutely indispensable to any young author's vocabulary. At this time I wrote a great deal for the family Herald, and also for various magazines, including London Society. In the latter my first winter work appeared, a story called A Regimental Martyr. I was very oddly placed at this point of my career, for I liked most doing the winter work, but the ordinary young lady-like fiction paid me so much the best that I could not afford to give it up. I was, like all young magazine writers, passionately desirous of appearing in book form. I knew not a single soul in the way connected with literary matters had absolutely no help or interest of any kind to aid me over the rough places, or even of whom to ask advice in times of doubt and difficulty. Mr. William Stevens was the only editor that I knew to whom I could go and say, is this right, or is that wrong? And I think it may be interesting to say here that I have never asked for, or indeed used, a letter of introduction in my life, that is, in connection with any literary business. Well, when I had been hard at work for several years I wrote a very long book. Upon my word, in spite of my good memory, I forget what it was called. The story, however, lives in my mind well enough. It was the story of a very large family, about ten girls and boys, who all made brilliant marriages, and lived a sort of shabby, idyllic, happy life, somewhat on the plan of God for us all and the devil take the hindermost. Need I say that it was told in the first person and in the present tense, and that the heroine was anything but good-looking? I was very young, then, and thought a great deal of my pretty bits of writing, and those seductive scraps of moralising against which Mr. Stevens was always warning me. Well, this very long, not to say spun-out account of this very large family of boys and girls, did not happen to please the readers for the family herald, then my stay-by. So I thought I would have a try round the various publishers, and see if I could not get it brought out in three volumes. Of course I tried all the best people first, and very often, when I receive from struggling young authors, who know a great deal more about my past history than I do myself, and who frequently write to ask me the best and easiest way to get on at novel writing, without either hard work, or waiting, or disappointment, because, if you please, my own beginnings were so singularly successful and delightful. The information that I have never known of any of their troubles, it seems to me that my past and my present cannot be the past and present of the same woman. Yet they are. I went through it all, the same sickening disappointments, the same hopes and fears. I trod the self-same path that every beginner must assuredly tread, as we must all in time tread that other path to the grave. I went through it all, and with that exceedingly long and detailed account of that large and shabby family, I trod the thorny path of publishing almost the bitter end. I, even to the goal where we find the full-blown swindler waiting for us with bland looks and honeyed words of sweetest flattery. Dear, dear, many who read this will know the process. It seldom varies. First I sent my carefully written manuscript, whose very handwriting betrayed my youth, to a certain firm which had offices of the Strand, to be considered for publication. The firm very kindly did consider it, and their consideration was such that they made me an offer of publication on certain terms. Their polite note informed me that their readers had read the work and thought very highly of it, that they were inclined, just by the way of completing their list for the approaching September, the best month in the year for bringing out novels, to bring it out, although I was, as yet, unknown to fame. Then came the first hint of the consideration, which took the form of a hundred pounds, to be paid down in three sums, all to fall due before the day of publication. I worked out the profits which could accrue with the entire edition sold out. I found that in that case I should have a nice little sum for myself of a hundred and eighty pounds. Now, no struggling young author in his or her senses is silly enough to throw away the chance of making a hundred and eighty pounds in one lump. I thought, and I thought the whole scheme out, and I must confess that the more I thought about it, the more utterly tempting did the offer seem. To risk a hundred pounds, and to make a hundred and eighty pounds, why it was a positive sin to lose such a chance. Therefore I scraped a hundred pounds together, and with my mother set off for London, feeling that at last I was going to conquer the world. We did a theatre on the strength of my coming good fortune, and the morning after our arrival in town set off, in my case at all events, with swelling hearts, to keep the appointment with the kindly publisher, who was going to put me in the way of making fame and fortune. I opened the door and went in. "'Is, Mr.—' "'At home,' I asked. I was forthwith conducted to an inner sanctum, where I was received by the head of the firm himself. Then I experienced my first shock. He squinted. Now I never could endure a man with a squint, and I distrusted this man instantly. You note there are squints and squints. There is the soft, uncertain squint feminine, which is really charming. And there is a particular obliquity of vision, which in a man rather gives a larky expression, and so makes you feel that there is nothing prim and formal about him, and seems to put you on good terms at once. And there is a cold, blooded squint, which makes your flesh creep, and which, when taken in connection with business, brings little stories to your mind. "'Is anyone coming, Sister Anne?' and that sort of thing. "'Mr.' asked me to excuse him a moment while he gave some instructions, and without waiting for my permission, looked through a few letters, shouted a message down a speaking tube. And then, after having arranged the fate of about half a dozen novels by the means of the same instrument, he sent a final message down the tube, asking for my manuscript, only to be told that he would find it in the top right-hand drawer of his desk. As a matter of fact, all this delay, intended to impress me and make me understand what a great thing had happened to me in having one attention from so busy a man, simply did for Mr.—so far as I was concerned. Instead of impressing me, it gave me time to get used to the place, it gave me time to look at Mr.—when he was not looking at me. Then, having found the manuscript, he looked at me and prepared to give me his undivided attention. "'Well,' he said, with a long breath, as if it was quite a relief to see a new face. I am very glad you have decided to close with our offer. We confidently expect a great success with your book. We shall have to change the title, though. There's a good deal in a title.' I replied modestly that there was a good deal in a title. But, I added, I have not closed with your offer. On the contrary, I—' He looked up sharply, and he squinted worse than ever. "'Oh, I quite thought that you had definitely—not at all,' I replied. Then added a piece of information which could not by any chance have been new to him. "'A hundred pounds is a lot of money, you know,' I remarked. "'Mr.—' looked at me in a meditative fashion. "'Well, if you have not got the money,' he said rather contemptuously, "'we might make a slight reduction. Say, if we brought it down to seventy-five pounds, so only because our readers have spoken so highly of the story. "'Now, look here, I will show you what our readers says, which is a favour that we don't extend to every one that I can tell you. Here it is.' "'Probably in the whole of his somewhat checkered career as a publisher, Mr.—' "'Never committed such a fatal mistake, as by handing me the report on my history in detail of that very large family of boys and girls. "'Bright, crisp, racy,' it ran, very unequal in parts, wants a good deal of revision, and should be entirely rewritten. Would be better if the story was brought to a conclusion when the heroine first meets with the hero after the parting, as all the rest forms an anti-climax. This might be worked up into a really popular novel, especially as it is written very much in Miss Blank's style. Naming a then popular authoress whose sole merit consisted in being the most faithful imitator of the gifted founder of a very pernicious school. I put the sheet of paper down, feeling very sick and ill, and the worst of it was, I knew that every word of it was true. I was young and inexperienced then, and had not nows enough to say plump out that my eyes had been opened, and that I could see that I should be neither more nor less than a fool if I wasted a single farthing over a story that must be utterly worthless. So I prevaricated mildly, and said that I certainly did not feel inclined to throw a hundred or even seventy-five pounds away over a story without some certainty of success. I'll think it over during the day," I said, rising from my chair. "'Oh, we must know within an hour at the outside,' Mr. Cahm said very curtly. Our arrangements will not wait, and the time is very short now for us to decide on our books for September. Of course, if you have not got the money, we might reduce a little more. We are always glad, if possible, to meet our clients.' "'It's not that,' I replied, looking at him straight. I have the money in my pocket, but a Yorkshire woman does not put down a hundred pounds without some idea what is going to be done with it.' "'You must let me have your answer within an hour, Mr. Cahm remarked briefly.' "'I will,' said I, in my most polite manner. But I really must think out the fact that you are willing to knock off twenty-five pounds at one blow. It seems to me, if you could afford to take that much off, and perhaps a little more, there must have been something very odd about your original offer.' "'My time is precious,' said Mr. Cahm, in a grumpy voice. "'Then good-morning,' said I cheerfully. My hopes were all dashed to the ground again. But I felt very cheerful, nevertheless. I trotted round to my friend Mr. Stevens, who gave a whistle of astonishment at my story. "'I'll send my head-clark round for your manuscript at once,' he said. Else you'll probably never see it again. And so he did, and so ended my next attempt to bring out my first book.' After this I felt very keenly the real truth of the old saying, Virtue is its own reward. For not long after my episode with Mr. Cahm, the then editor of London's Society wrote to me, saying that he thought that, as I had already had several stories published in the magazine, it might make a very attractive volume, if I could add a few more, and bring them out as a collection of soldier stories. I did not hesitate very long over this offer, but set to work with all the enthusiasm of youth, and youth does have the advantage of being full of the fire of enthusiasm, if of nothing else, and I turned out enough news stories to make a very respectable volume. Then followed the period of waiting, to which all literary folk must accustom themselves. I was, however, always of a tolerably long suffering disposition, and possessed my soul in patience as well as I could. The next thing I heard was that the book had very good prospects, but that it would have its chances greatly improved if it were in two volumes, instead of being in only one. Well youth's generous, and I did not see the wisdom of spoiling the ship for the traditional hampers of tar, so I cheerfully set to work, and evolved another volume of stories, all of smart, long-legged soldiers, and with, as heaven knows, no more idea of setting myself up as possessing all knowledge about soldiers and the service than I had of aspiring to the crown of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. But even then I had need of a vast amount of patience, for time went on, and really my book seemed as far from publication as ever. Every now and then I had a letter telling me that the arrangements were nearly completed, and that it would probably be brought out by messes so and so. But days wore into weeks, and weeks into months, until I really began to feel as if my first literary babe was doomed to die before it was born. Then arose a long haggle over terms, which I had thought was settled, and to be on the same terms as the magazine rates, no such wonderful scale after all. However, my literary guide, philosopher, and friend thought, as he was doing me the inestimable service of bringing me out, that twenty pounds was an ample honorarium for myself. But I, being young and poor, did not see things in the same light at all. Try as I would, and I cannot lay claim to trying very hard. I could not see why a man who had never seen me should have put himself to so much trouble out of a spirit of pure philanthropy and a desire to help a struggling young author forward. So I obstinately kept to my point, and said if I did not have thirty pounds I would rather have all of the stories back again. I think nobody would credit to-day what that special bit of firmness cost me. Still I would cheerfully have died before I would have given in, having once conceived my claim to be a just one. A bad habit on the whole, and one that has since cost me dear more than once. Eventually my guide and I came to terms for the sum for which I had held out, namely thirty pounds, which was the price I received for my very first book. In addition to about eight pounds that I had already had from the magazine for serial use of a few of the stories. So in due course my book, under the title of Cavalry Life, was brought out in two great cumbersome volumes by Messers Chateau and Windus, and I was launched upon the world as a full-blown author under the name of Winter. So many people have asked me why I took that name, and how I came to think of it, that it will not, perhaps, be amiss if I give the reason in this paper. It happened like this. During our negotiations my guide suggested that I had better take some non de guerre, as it would never do to bring out such a book under a woman's name. Make it as real sounding and non committing as you can," he wrote. And so, after much cogitation and cuddling of my brains, I chose the name of the hero of the only story of the series which was written in the first person, and called myself J. S. Winter. I believe that Cavalry Life was published on the last day of 1881. Then followed the most trying time of all, that of waiting to see what the press would say of this, my first child, which had been so long in coming to life, and had been chopped and changed, bundled from pillar to post, until my heart was almost worn out before ever it saw the light. Then, on January 14th, 1882, I went into the subscription library at York, where I was living, and began to search the new journals through, in but faint hopes, however, of seeing a review of my book so soon as that. For I was quite alone in the world, so far as literary matters went. Indeed, not one friend did I possess, who could in any way influence my career, or obtain the slightest favour for me. I remember that morning so well. It is, I think, printed on my memory as the word Calle was on the heart of Queen Mary. It was a fine cold morning, and there was a blazing fire in the inner room where the reviews were kept. I sat down at the table, and took up the Saturday review, never dreaming for a moment that I should be honoured by so much as a mention in a journal which I held in such awe and respect. And as I turned over the leaves, my eyes fell on a row of footnotes at the bottom of the page, giving the names of the books which were noticed above, and among them I saw Cavalry Life by J. S. Winter. For full ten minutes I sat there, feeling sick and more fit to die than anything else. I was perfectly incapable of looking at the notice above, but at last I plucked up courage to meet my fate, very much as one summons up courage to have a tooth out and get the horrid wrench over. Judge my surprise and joy, when on reading the notice, I found that the Saturday had given me a rattling good notice, praising the new author heartily and without stint. I shall never, as long as I live, forget the effect of that, my first review upon me. For quite half an hour I sat without moving, only feeling I shall never be able to keep it up. I shall never be able to follow it up by another. I felt paralysed, faint, crushed, anything but elated and jubilant. And at last, through some instinct, I put my hand up to my head to find that it was cold and wet, as if it had been dipped in the river. Thank heaven, from that day to this, I had never known what a cold sweat was. It was my first experience of such a thing, and sincerely I hope it will be my last. End of Cavalry Life by John Strange Winter Section 19 of my first book by various authors This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Ruth Golding. Inverse by Brett Hart When I say that my first book was not my own, and contained beyond the title page not one word of my own composition, I trust that I shall not be accused of trifling with paradox, or tardily unbosoming myself of youthful plagery. But the fact remains that in priority of publication, the first book for which I became responsible, and which probably provoked more criticism than anything I have written since, was a small compilation of Californian poems, indicted by other hands. A well-known bookseller of San Francisco one day handed me a collection of certain poems which had already appeared in Pacific Coast magazines and newspapers, with the request that I should, if possible, secure further additions to them, and then make a selection of those which I considered the most notable and characteristic, for a single volume to be issued by him. I have reason to believe that this unfortunate man was actuated by a laudable desire to publish a pretty Californian book, his first essay in publication, and at the same time to foster Eastern immigration by an exhibit of the Californian literary product. But, looking back upon his venture, I am inclined to think that the little volume never contained anything more poetically pathetic, or touchingly imaginative, than that gentle conception. Equally simple and trustful was his selection of myself as compiler. It was based somewhat, I think, upon the fact that the artless helicon I boasted was youth, but I imagine it was chiefly owing to the circumstance that I had, from the outset, with precocious foresight, confided to him my intention of not putting any of my own verses in the volume. Publishers are appreciative, and the self-abnegation sows the blame, to say nothing of its security, was not without its effect. We settled to our work with facture self-complacency, and knows the suspicion of the trouble in store for us, or the storm that was to presently hurtle around our devoted heads. I winnowed the poems, and he exploited a preliminary announcement to an eager and waiting press, and we moved together unwittingly to our doom. I remember to have been early struck with the quantity of material coming in, evidently the result of some popular misunderstanding of the announcement. I found myself in daily and hourly receipt of sear and yellow fragments originally torn from some dead and gone newspaper, creased and seamed from long folding in wallet or pocketbook. Need I say that most of them were of an emotional or didactic nature? Need I add any criticism of these homely souvenirs, often discoloured by the morning coffee, the evening tobacco, or heaven knows, perhaps blotted by two easy tears? Enough that I knew now what had become of those original but never recopied verses, which filled the poet's corner of every country newspaper on the coast. I knew now the genesis of every didactic verse that coldly furnished forth the marriage table in the announcement of weddings in the rural press. I knew now who had read and possibly indicted the dreary hick jasits of the dead in their morning columns. I knew now why certain letters of the alphabet had been more tenderly considered than others, and affectionately addressed. I knew the meaning of the lines to her who can best understand them, and I knew that they had been understood. The morning's post buried my table beneath these withered leaves of posthumous passion. They lay there like the pathetic nosegaze of quickly fading wild flowers gathered by school children inconsistently abandoned upon roadsides, or as inconsistently treasured as limp and flabby superstitions in their desks. The chill wind from the bay blowing in at my window seemed to rustle them into sad, articulate appeal. I remember that when one of them was whisked from the window by a stronger gust than usual, and was attaining a circulation it had never known before, I ran a block or two to recover it. I was young then, and in an exalted sense of editorial responsibility which I have since survived, I think I turned pale at the thought that the reputation of some unknown genius might have thus been swept out and swallowed by the all-absorbing scene. There were other difficulties arising from this unexpected wealth of material. There were dozens of poems on the same subject. The Golden Gates, Manchester, the Yosemite were especially provocative. A beautiful bird known as the Californian Canary appeared to have been shot at and winged by every poet from Portland to San Diego. Lines to the Mariposa flower were as thick as the lovely blossoms themselves in the Merced Valley, and the Madronye tree was as verimed as Rosalind. Again, by a liberal construction of the publisher's announcement, manuscript poems which had never known print began to coily unfold their virgin blossoms in the morning's mail. They were accompanied by a few lines, stating casually that their sender had found them lying forgotten in his desk, or mendaciously, that they were thrown off on the spur of the moment a few hours before. Some of the names appended to them astonished me. Grave practical businessmen, sage financiers, fierce speculators, and plodding traders, never before suspected of poetry or even correct prose, were among the contributors. It seemed as if most of the able-bodied inhabitants of the Pacific Coast had been in the habit at some time of expressing themselves in verse. Some sought confidential interviews with the editor. The climax was reached when, in Montgomery Street one day, I was approached by a well-known and venerable judicial magnate. After some serious preliminary conversation, the old gentleman finally alluded to what he was pleased to call a task of great delicacy and responsibility laid upon my young shoulders. In fact, he went on paternally, adding the weight of his judicial hand to that burden, I have thought of speaking to you about it. In my leisure moments on the bench, I have, from time to time, polished and perfected a certain college poem, begun years ago, but which may now be said to have been finished in California, and thus embraced in the scope of your proposed selection. If the few extracts selected by myself to save you all trouble and responsibility be of any benefit to you, my dear young friend, consider them at your service. In this fashion the contributions had increased to three times the bulk of the original collection, and the difficulties of selection were augmented in proportion. The editor and publisher eyed each other aghast. Never thought there were so many of the blamed things alive, said the latter with great simplicity. Had you, the editor had not. Couldn't you sort of shake them up and condense them, you know? Keep their ideas and their names separate, so that they'd have proper credit. See? The editor pointed out that this would infringe the rule he had laid down. I see, said the publisher thoughtfully. Well, couldn't you pare them down? Give the first verse entire and sort of sample the others. The editor thought not. There was clearly nothing to do but to make a more rigid selection. A difficult performance when the material was uniformly on a certain dead level, which it is not necessary to define here. Among the rejections were, of course, the usual plagiarism as from well-known authors, imposed upon an inexperienced country press. Several admirable pieces detected as acrostics of patent medicines and certain veiled libals and indecentcies, such as Mark the First, publications on blank walls and fences of the average youth. Still the bulk remained too large, and the youthful editor set to work reducing it still more, with a sympathising concern which the good-natured but unliterary publisher failed to understand, and which alas proved to be equally unappreciated by the rejected contributors. The book appeared, a pretty little volume typographically, and externally a credit to pioneer book-making. Copies were liberally supplied to the press, and authors and publisher self-complacently awaited the result. To the latter this should have been satisfactory. The book sold readily from his well-known counters to purchasers who seemed to be drawn by a singular curiosity, unaccompanied, however, by any critical comment. People would lounge into the shop, turn over the leaves of other volumes, say carelessly, got a new book of California poetry out, haven't you? Purchase it and quietly depart. There were, as yet, no notices from the press. The big dailies were silent. There was something ominous in this calm. Out of it the bolt fell. A well-known mining weekly, which I hear poetically veil under the title of the red dog Jayhawk, was first to swoop down upon the tuneful and unsuspecting quarry. At this century end of fastidious and complacent criticism, it may be interesting to recall the direct style of the Californian sixties. The hogwash and perp stuff ladled out from the slot bucket of messes, blank and covered frisco, by some loppaired eastern apprentice, and called a compilation of Californian verse, might be passed over, so far as criticism goes. A club in the hands of any able-bodied citizen of red dog and a steamboat ticket to the bay, cheerfully contributed from this office, would be all sufficient. But when an imported greenhorn dares to call his flap-doodle mixture Californian, it is an insult to the state that has produced the gifted yellow hammer, whose lofty flights have, from time to time, dazzled our readers in the columns of the Jayhawk. That this complacent editorial jackass, browsing among the dock and thistles, which he has served up in this volume, should make no allusion to California's greatest bard, is rather a confession of his idiocy, than a slur upon the genius of our esteemed contributor. I turned hurriedly to my pile of rejected contributions, the nom de plume of yellow hammer did not appear among them. Certainly I had never heard of its existence. Later, when a friend showed me one of that gifted bard's pieces, I was inwardly relieved. It was so like the majority of the other verses in and out of the volume, that the mysterious poet might have written under a hundred aliases. But the duct-flat clarion, following with no uncertain sound, left me small time for consideration. We doubt, said that journal, if a more feeble collection of drivel could have been made, even if taken exclusively from the editor's own verses, which we note he has, by an equal editorial incompetency left out of the volume. When we add that, by a felicity of idiotic selection, this person has chosen only one, and the least characteristic of the really clever poems of Adonir and Skaggs, which have so often graced these columns, we have said enough to satisfy our readers. The Mormon Hill Quartz Crusher relieved this simple directness with more fancy. We don't know why Messers Blank and Coe send us, under the title of Selection of Californian Poetry, a quantity of slum gullion, which really belongs to the sleuthiers of a place of mining camp, or the ditches of the rural districts. We have sometimes been compelled to run a lot of tailings through our stamps, but never of the grade of the samples offered, which we should say would average about thirty-three and a third cents per tonne. We have, however, come across a single specimen of pure gold, evidently overlooked by the serene ass who has compiled this volume. We copy it with pleasure, as it has already shone in the poet's corner of the crusher, as the gifted effusion of the talented manager of the Excelsior Mill, otherwise known to our delighted readers as Outcrop. The green spring's Arcadian was no less fanciful in imagery. Messers Blank and Coe send us a gaudy green and yellow parrot-coloured volume, which is supposed to contain the first calo-cheapings and peepings of Californian songsters. From the flavour of the specimens before us, we should say that the nest had been disturbed prematurely. There seems to be a good deal of the parrot inside, as well as outside the covers, and we congratulate our own sweet singer, Bluebird, who has so often made these columns melodious that she has escaped the ignominy of being exhibited in Messers Blank and Coe's aviary. I should add that this simile of the aviary and its occupants was ominous, for my tuneful choir was relentlessly slaughtered. The bottom of the cage was strewn with feathers. The Big Dailies collected the criticisms and published them in their own columns, with the grim irony of exaggerated headlines. The book sold tremendously on account of this abuse, but I am afraid that the public was disappointed. The fun and interest lay in the criticisms, and not in any pointedly ludicrous quality in the rather commonplace collection, and I fear I cannot claim for it even that merit. And it will be observed that the animus of the criticism appeared to be the omission, rather than the retention of certain writers. But this brings me to the most extraordinary feature of this singular demonstration. I do not think that the publishers were at all troubled by it. I cannot conscientiously say that I was. I have every reason to believe that the poets themselves, in and out of the volume, were not displeased at the notoriety they had not expected, and I have long since been convinced that my most remorseless critics were not in earnest, but were obeying some sudden impulse started by the first attacking journal. The extravagance of the red dog Jayhawk was emulated by others. It was a large contagious joke, passed from journal to journal, in a peculiar cyclonic western fashion. And there still lingers, not unpleasantly in my memory, the conclusion of a cheerfully scathing review of the book, which may make my meaning clearer. If we have said anything in this article, which might cause a single pang to the poetically sensitive nature of the useful individual calling himself Mr. France's Bret Hart, but who, we believe, occasionally parts his name and his hair in the middle. We will feel that we have not laboured in vain, and are ready to sing nonctimities, and hand in our checks. We have no doubt of the absolutely polluted and lactile purity of Frankie's intentions. He means well to the Pacific coast, and we return the compliment. But he has strayed away from his parents and guardians while he was too fresh. He will not keep without a little salt. It was thirty years ago. The book and its Rabilasian criticisms have been long since forgotten. Alas, I fear that even the capacity for that gargantuan laughter which met them in those days exists no longer. The names I have used are necessarily fictitious. But where I have been applied to quote the criticisms from memory, I have, I believe, only softened their asperity. I do not know that this story has any moral. The criticisms here recorded never hurt a reputation nor repressed a single honest aspiration. A few contributors to the volume who were of original merit have made their mark, independently of it or its critics. The editor, who was for two months the most abused man on the Pacific's slope, within the year became the editor of its first successful magazine. Even the publisher prospered and died respected. Dead Man's Rock by Q. Sir Arthur Thomas Quillercouch I cherish no parental illusions about Dead Man's Rock. It is two or three years since I read a page of that bloodthirsty romance, and my only copy of it was found the other day in turning out the lumber-room at the top of the house. Later editions have been allowed to appear with all the inaccuracies and crudities of the first. On page 116 Bombay is still situated in the Bay of Bengal, and may continue to adorn that shore. The error must be amusing, since unknown friends continue to write and confess themselves tickled by it. And it is stupid to begin amending a book in which you have lost interest. But though this is my attitude towards Dead Man's Rock, I can still look back on the writing of it, as on an amusing adventure. It was begun in the late summer of 1886, and was my first attempt at telling a story on paper. I am careful to say on paper, because in childhood I was telling myself stories from morning to night. Tens of thousands of small boys are doing the same every day in the year, but I should be sorry to guess how much of my time between the ages of seven and thirteen must have been given up to weaving these childish epics. They were curious jumbles, the characters, of which I had a constant set, being drawn indiscriminately from the Mort De Arthur, Bunions Holy War, Popes Iliad, Ivanhoe, and a book of fairy tales by Holm Lee, as well as from history, and the themes ranging from battles and tournaments to cricket, wrestling, and sailing matches. Anachronisms never troubled the storyteller. The Duke of Wellington would cheerfully break a lance with Captain Credence or Tristan of Leonès, and I rarely made up a football fifteen without including Hardy Canute, whom I love for his name, Hector, dear for his own sake, and Wamba, who supplied the comic interest and scored authorities. They were brave companions, but at the age of thirteen they deserted me suddenly, or perhaps after reading Mr. Stevenson's Chapter on Dreams, I had better say it was the Pisces, the small people, who deserted me. They alone knew why, for their pensioner had never betrayed a single one of their secrets, or why in these later times when he sells their confidences for money they have come back to help him, though more sparingly. Three or four of the little stories in Knotts and Crosses are but translated dreams, and there are others in my notebook. But now I never compose without some pain, whereas in the old days I had but to sit alone in a corner or take a solitary walk, and invite them, and they did all the work. But one summer evening I summoned them and met with no response. Without warning the tales had come to an end. From my first school at Newton Abbot I went to Clifton, and from Clifton in my nineteenth year to Oxford. It was here that the old desire to weave stories began to come back. Mr. Stevenson's Treasure Island was the immediate cause. I had been scribbling all through my school days, had written a prodigious quantity of bad reflective poetry, and burnt it as soon as I really began to reflect, and was now plying the Oxford magazine with Light Verse, a large proportion of which was lately reprinted in a thin volume with a title of Green Bays. But I wrote little or no prose. My prose essays at school are execrable. I had followed after false models for a while, and when gently made aware of this by the sound and kindly scholar who looked over our sixth form essays at Clifton, had turned dispirited and wrote scarcely at all. Though reading great quantities of fiction, I had, as has been said, no thought of telling a story. And so far as I knew, no faculty, the desire at least was awakened by Treasure Island. And in explanation of this I can only quote the gentleman who reviewed my first book in the Athenium, and observe that great wits jump and lesser wits jump with them. That is just the truth of it. I began as a pupil and imitator of Mr. Stevenson, and was lucky in my choice of a master. The germ of Dead Man's Rock was a curious little bit of family lore, which I may extract from my father's history of Pulpero, a small haven on the Cornish coast. The Richard Quiller of whom he speaks is my great-grandfather. In the old home of the Quillers at Pulpero there was hanging on a beam a key, which we as children regarded with respect and awe, and never dared to touch, for Richard Quiller had put the key of his quadrant on a nail with strong injunctions that no one should take it off until his return, which never happened, and there I believe it still hangs. His brother John served for several years as commander of a hired armed lager, employed in carrying dispatches in the French War, Richard accompanying him as a subordinate officer. They were engaged in the inglorious bombardment of flushing in 1809. Some short time after this they were taken after a desperate fight with a pirate into Algiers, but were liberated on the severe remonstrances of the British consul. They returned to their homes in most miserable plight, having lost their all except their Bible, much valued then by the unfortunate sailors, and now by a descendant in whose possession it is. About the year 1812 these same brothers sailed to the island of Tenerife in an armed merchant ship, but after leaving that place were never heard of. Here then I had the simple apparatus for a mystery, for of course the key must be made to unlock something far more uncommon than a quadrant, and I still think at a capital apparatus had I only possessed the wit to use it properly. There was romance in this key. That was obvious enough, and I puzzled over it for some weeks by the end of which my plot had grown to something like this. A family living in poverty though heirs to great wealth, this wealth buried close to their door, and the key to unlock it hanging over their heads from morning to night. It was soon settled too that this family should be Cornish, and the scene laid on the Cornish coast, Cornwall being the only corner of the earth with which I had more than a superficial acquaintance. So far so good, but what was the treasure to be? And what the reason that stood between its inheritors and their enjoyment of it? As it happened these two questions were answered together. The small library at Trinity, a delightful room where Dr. Johnson spent many quiet hours at work upon his dictionary, is fairly rich in books of old travel and discovery, fine folios for the most part filling the shelves on your left as you enter. To the study of these I gave up a good many hours that should have been spent on ancient history of another pattern, and more directly profitable for greats. And in one of them—perchas, I think, but will not swear—first came on the great ruby of Solon. Not long after, a note in Yule's edition of Marco Polo set my imagination fairly in chase of this remarkable gem, and I hunted up all the accessible authorities. The size of this ruby, as thick as a man's arms says Marco Polo, while Mondeville, who was an artist and lied with exactitude, puts it at a foot in length and five fingers in girth, its color, like unto fire, and the mystery and completeness of its disappearance, combined to fascinate me. No form of riches is so romantic as a precious stone with a heart in it and a history. I had only to endow it with a curse proportionate to its size and beauty, and I had all that a storyteller could possibly want. But even a treasure hunt is a poor affair unless you have two parties vying for the booty, and a curse can hardly be worked effectively until you introduce the fighting element, and make destiny strike her blows through the passions, hate, greed, etc., of her victims. I had shaped my story to this point. The treasure was to be buried by a man who had slain his comrade and only confidant in order to enjoy the booty alone, and had afterwards become aware of the curse attached to its possession, and the descendants of these two men were to be rivals in the search for it, each side possessing half of the clue. It was at this point, that like George IV, I invented a buckle. My buckle had two clasps, and on these the secret of the treasure was so engraved as to become intelligible only when they were united. My plot had now taken something like a shape, but it had one serious defect. It would not start to walk. Cokes it as I might, it would not budge. Even the worst book must have a beginning. This reflection was no less distressing than obvious, for mine had none, and there is no saying it would ever have found one, but for a lucky accident. In the long vacation of 1885, I spent three weeks or a month at the lizard pollocking and reading play-toe. Knowing at that time comparatively little of this corner of the coast, I had brought one or two guidebooks and local histories in the bottom of my portmanteau. One evening, after a stiff walk along the cliffs, I put the Republic aside for a certain history and description of the parish of Mullen, by its vicar, the reverend E. G. Harvey, and came up on a passage that immediately shook my scraps of invention into their proper places. The passage in question was a narrative of the wreck of the junkier Meester Van de Waal, a Dutch bark on the night of March 25, 1867. I cannot quote at length the vicar's description of this wreck, but in substance, and in many of its details, it is the story of the bell fortune in Dead Man's Rock. The vessel broke up in the night and drowned every soul on board except a Greek sailor, who was found early next morning clambering about the rocks under cliff between Polurian and Polju. This man's behaviour was mysterious from the first, and his evidence at the enquest held on the drowned bodies of his shipmates was, to say the least, extraordinary. He said, My name is Giorgio Bofani. I was seaman on board the ship which belonged to Dordrecht. I joined the ship at Batavia. But I do not know the name of the ship or the name of the captain. Being shown, however, the official list of Dutch East Indian men, he pointed to one built in 1854, the cosmopoliet, Captain Konig. He then told a story of the disaster, which there was no one to contradict, and the jury returned a verdict of accidentally drowned. The Greek made his bow and left the neighbourhood. Just after the enquest, Mr Broad, Dutch consul at Falmouth, arrived bringing with him the captains of two Dutch East Indian men, then lying at Falmouth. One of them asked at once, Is it Klaas Lamerts? Being told that the cosmopoliet was the name of the wreck ship, he said, I don't believe it. The cosmopoliet wouldn't be due for a fortnight almost. It must be Klaas Lamerts vessel. The vicar, who had now come up, showed a scrap of flannel he had picked up, with six KL marked upon it. Ah, said the Dutchman, it must be so. It must be the junk here, but she had been returned cosmopoliet at the enquest, so there the matter rested. On the Friday following, however, pursues the vicar. When Mr Broad and this Dutch captain again visited Mullian, the first thing handed them was a parchment which had been picked up, meanwhile, and this was none other than the Masonic diploma of Klaas Van Lamerts. Here, then, was no room for doubt. The ship was identified as the John Kiermeester van de Waal van Puttershock, Captain Klaas Van Lamerts, 650 tonnes register, homeward bound from the East Indies with a cargo of sugar, coffee, spices, and some banca tin. The value of the ship and cargo would be between forty thousand pounds and fifty thousand pounds. It may be added that on the afternoon before the wreck, the vessel had been seen to misstays more than once in her endeavour to beat off the land, and generally to behave as if handled by an unaccountably clumsy crew. All together, folks on shore had grave suspicions that there was mutiny or extreme disorder of some kind on board, but of this nothing was ever certainly known. I think this narrative was no sooner read than digested into the scheme of my romance, now for some months neglected and almost forgotten, but the final school of literary humaniaries loomed unpleasantly near, and just a year passed before I could turn my discovery into account. The following August found me at Petworth in Sussex, lodging over a clockmaker's shop that looked out upon the market square. Petworth is quiet, and at that time my noose scarcely a soul in the place, but lovely scenery lies all around it, and on a hot afternoon you may do worse than stretch yourself on the slopes above the wheeled and smoke and do nothing. There is one small common in particular, close to the monument at the top of the park and just outside the park wall, where I spent many hours looking across the blue country to Blackton and lazily making up my mind about the novel. In the end, it was sometime in September, I called on the local stationer and bought a large heap of superior fullscap. A travelling waxwork company was unpacking its caravan in the square outside my window in the morning when I pulled in my chair and lightheartedly wrote Dead Man's Rock, a Romance, by Q, at the top of the first sheet of fullscap. The initial was my old initial of the Oxford Magazine Verses, and the title had been settled on for some time before. Staying with some friends on the Cornish coast, I had been taken to a picnic, or some similar function, on a beach, where they showed me a pillar-shaped rock standing boldly up from the sands and veined with curious red streaks resembling blood stains. I want a story written about that rock, a lady of the party had said. Something really bloodthirsty. Slaughter Rock might do for the name. But my title was really borrowed from the Dodman locally called Dead Man, a promontory east of Falmouth between Varian and St. Austel Bays. I had covered two pages of fullscap before the brass band of the waxwork show struck up and drove me out of doors and along the road that leads to the railway station, the only dull road around Petworth, and chosen now for that very reason. A good half of that morning's work was afterwards torn up, but I felt at the time that the enterprise was going well. I had written slowly but easily, and, of course, believed that I had found my vocation, and would always be able to write easily. Most vain delusion! For in six years and a half I have recaptured the fluency of that morning not half a dozen times. Still, I continued to take a lively interest in my story, and wrote it very steadily, finishing Book One before my return to Oxford. It surprised me, though, that for all my interest in it the story gave me little or no emotion. Once only did I get a genuine thrill, and that was at the point where young Jasper finds the sailor's cap, page 25, and why at this point more than another is past explaining. In later efforts I have written several pages with a shaking pin and a meddismal signs of grief, and on revision have usually had to tear those pages up. On the whole my short experience goes against C. Viss Mifleur, Dolenda Mest, Primum ipsi tibi. But if on revision an author is moved to tears or laughter by any part of his work, then he may reckon pretty safely upon it, no matter with how stony a gravity it was written. Book One, just half the tale, was finished then, and put aside. The Oxford-Mickle-Must term was beginning, and there were lectures to be prepared, but this was not all the reason. To tell the truth I had wound up my story into a very pretty coil, and how to unwind it was past my contriving. When the book appeared its critics agreed in pronouncing Part One to be a deal better than Part Two, and they were right, for Book Two is little more than a violent cutting of half a dozen knots that had been tied in the gayest of spirits. And it must be owned, moreover, that the long arm of coincidence was invoked to perform a great part of the cutting. For the time, however, the unfinished MS lay in the drawer of my writing table, and I went back to Virgil and Aristophanes and scribbled more verses for Oxford Magazine. None of my friends knew at that time of my excursion into fiction, but one of them possesses the acutest eye in Oxford, and with just a perceptible twinkle in it, he asked me suddenly one evening, towards the end of term, if I had yet begun to write a novel. The shot was excellently fired, and I surrendered my MS at once, the more gladly because believing in his judgment. Next morning he asserted that he had sat up half the night to read it. His look was of the freshest, but he came triumphantly out of cross-examination and urged me to finish the story. In my elated mood I would have promised anything, and set to work at once to think out the rest of the plot, but it was not until Easter vacation that I finished the book in a farmhouse at the head of wastewater. Another friend was with me, who in the intervals of climbing, put all his enthusiasm into Aristotle and logic while I hammered away at the immortal product, as we termed it by consent. It was further agreed that he should abstain from looking at a line of it until the whole was written. A compact which I have not heard he found any difficulty in keeping. Indeed there was plenty to occupy us both without the book. Snow lay thick on the fells that spring, and the glissading was excellent. We had found, or thought we had, a new way up the Micaldorcliffs, and Mr Gladstone had just introduced his first home rule-bill, and made the newspapers, which reached us a day late, very good reading. However the MS was finished and read with sincere and discriminating approval on the eve of our departure. The next step was to find a publisher. My earliest hopes had inclined upon my friend, Mr Aerosmith of Bristol, who, I hoped, might remember me as having for a time edited The Cliftonian, but the book was clearly too long for his railway library, and on this reflection I determined to try the publishers of Treasure Island. Mr Littleton Jell, of the Clarendon Press, was kind enough to provide a letter of introduction. The MS went to Messers-Cassell and Co., and I fear the end of my narrative must be even duller than the beginning. Messers-Cassell accepted the book, and have published all its successors. The inference to be drawn from this is pleasant and obvious, and I shall be glad if my readers will draw it. It is the rule I find to conclude such a confession as this with a paragraph or so in abuse of the literary calling, to parade oneself before the youth of Mary England as the Spartans paraded their drunken heelet, to mourn the expense of energies that in any other profession would have fetched the nobler pecuniary return. I cannot do this, at any rate I cannot do it yet. My calling ties me to no office stool, makes me no manslave, compels me to no action that my soul condemns. It sets me free from town life, which I loathe, and allows me to breathe clean air, to exercise limbs as well as brain, to tread good turf, and wake up every morning to the sound and smell of the sea, and that wide prospect which to my eyes is the dearest on earth. All happiness must be purchased with a price, though people seldom recognize this, and part of the price is that, living thus, a man can never amass a fortune. But as it is extremely unlikely that I could have done this in any pursuit, I may claim to have the better of the bargain. Certain gentlemen who have preceded me in this series have spoken of letters as of any ordinary characteristic pursuit. Naturally, therefore, they report unfavorably. But they seem to me to prove the obvious. Literature has her own pains, her own rewards, and it scarcely needs demonstration that one who can only bring to these a bagman's estimate had very much better be a bagman than an author. End of Dead Man's Rock by Q. Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch. Recording by Patty Cunningham and Iddills and Legends of Inverburn by Robert Buchanan My first serious effort in literature was what I may call a double-barreled one. In other words, I was seriously engaged upon two books at the same time, and it was by the merest accident that they did not appear simultaneously. As it was, only a few months divided one from the other, and they are always, in my own mind, inseparable or Siamese twins. The book of poems called Undertones was the one. The book of poems called Iddills and Legends of Inverburn was the other. They were published nearly thirty years ago when I was still a boy, and as they happened to bring me into connection more or less intimately with some of the leading spirits of the age, a few notes concerning them may be of interest. A word first as to my literary beginnings. I can scarcely remember the time when the idea of winning fame as an author had not occurred to me, and so I determined very early to adopt the literary profession, a determination which I unfortunately carried out to my own life-long discomfort and the annoyance of a large portion of the reading public. When a boy in Glasgow I made the acquaintance of David Gray, who was fired with a similar ambition to fly incontinently to London, the terrible city whose neglect is death, whose smile is fame, and to take it by storm, it seemed so easy. Westminster Abbey wrote to my friend to a correspondent, If I live I shall be buried there so help me God. I mean after Tennyson's death I myself wrote to Philip Hamilton to be poet laureate. From these samples of our callow speech the modesty of our ambition may be inferred. Well it all happened just as we planned, only otherwise. Through some blunder of arrangement we too started for London on the same day, but from different railway stations, and until some weeks afterwards one knew nothing of the other's exodus. I arrived at King's Cross railway station with the conventional half-crown in my pocket, literally and absolutely half a crown. I wandered about the great city till I was weary, fell in with a thief and good Samaritan who sheltered me, starved and struggled with abundant happiness, and finally found myself located at 66 Stamford Street, Waterloo Bridge, in a top room for which I paid, when I had the money, seven shillings a week. Here I lived royally with Duke Humphrey for many a day, and hither one sad morning I brought my poor friend Gray, whom I had discovered languishing somewhere in the borough, and who was already death-struck through sleeping out one night in Hyde Park. Footnote, see the writer's life of David Gray. End of footnote. Westminster Abbey, if I live I shall be buried there. Poor country's singing bird, the great dismal cage of the dead was not for him, thank God. He lies under the open heaven, close to the little river which he immortalised in song. After a brief sojourn in the dear old gas the bankrupt garret at number 66, he fluttered home to die. To that old garret in these days came living men of letters who were of large and important interest to us poor cheepers from the North. Richard Moncton Milnes, Lawrence Oliphant, Sidney Dobbell, among others, who took a kindly interest in my dying comrade. But afterwards, when I was left to fight the battle alone, the place was solitary. Ever reserved and independent, not to say duer and opinionated, I made no friends and cared for none. I had found a little work on the newspapers and magazines, just enough to keep body and soul alive, and while occupied with this I was busy on the literary twins, to which I referred at the opening of this paper. What did my isolation matter, when I had all the gods of Greece for company, to say nothing of the fares and trolls of Scottish fairyland? Pallas and Aphrodite haunted that old garret. Out on Waterloo Bridge, night after night, I saw Selene and all her nymphs. And when my heart sank low, the fairies of Scotland sang me lullabies. It was a happy time. Sometimes, for a fortnight together, I never had a dinner, save, perhaps, on Sunday, when a good-natured heebie would bring me covertly a slice from the landlord's joint. My favourite place of refreshment was the Caledonian coffee-house in Covent Garden. Here, for a few coppers, I could feast on coffee and muffins. Saturated with butter and worthy of the gods. Then, issuing forth full-fed, glowing, oleaginous, I would light my pipe and wander out into the lighted streets. Criticisms for the Athenaeum, then edited by Hepworth Dixon, brought me ten and six minutes a column. I used to go to the old office in Wellington Street, and have my contributions measured off on the current number with a foot-rule by good-old John Francis, the publisher. I wrote two for the literary Gazette, where the pay was less princely, seven and six minutes a column, I think, but with all extracts deducted. The Gazette was then edited by John Morley, who came to the office daily with a big dog. I well remember the time when you, a boy, came to me, a boy in Catherine Street, wrote Honest John to me years afterwards. But the neighbourhood of Covent Garden had greater wonders. Two or three times a week, walking, black-bag in hand, from Charing Cross Station to the Office of All the Year Round in Wellington Street, came the good, the only Dickens. From that good genie, the poor straggler from Fairyland got solid help and sympathy. Few can realise now what Dickens was, then, to London. His humour filled its literature like broad sunlight. The Gospel of Plum Pudding warmed every poor devil in Bohemia. At this time I was, save the mark, terribly in earnest, with a dogged determination to bow down to no graven literary idol, but to judge men of all ranks on their personal merits. I never had much reverence for gods of any sort. If the superior persons could not win me by love, I remained heretical. So it was a long time before I came close to any living souls, and all that time I was working away at my poems. Then, a little later, I used to go, or Sundays, to the open house of Westland Marston, which was then a great haunt of literary Bohemians. Here I first met Dinah Mulock, the author of John Halifax, who took a great fancy to me, used to carry me off to her little nest on Hampstead Heath, and lend me all her books. At Hampstead, too, I foregathered with Sidney Doe Bell, a strangely beautiful soul, with, what seemed to me then, very effeminate manners. Doe Bell's mouth was ever full of very pretty latinity, for the most part, vagillion. He was fond of quoting, as an example of perfect expression, sound conveying absolute sense of the thing described, the doggerel lines, down the stairs the young Mrs. Isran to have a look at Miss Kate's young man. The sibilance in the first line, he thought, admirably suggested the idea of the young ladies slipping along the banisters and peeping into the hall. But I had other friends, more helpful to me in preparing my first twin offering to the muses. The faces under the gas, the painted women on the bridge. How many a night have I walked up and down by their sides, and talked to them for hours together? The actors in the theatres, the ragged groups at the stage doors. London to me then was still fairyland. Even in the hay market, with its babbles of nymph and satyr, there was wonderful life from midnight to dawn. Deep sympathy with which told me that I was a born pagan, and could never be really comfortable in any modern temple of the proprieties. On other points connected with that old life on the borders of Bohemia, I need not touch. It has all been so well done already by Miotje in the Vida Boheme, and it will not bear translation into contemporary English. There were cakes and ale, pipes and beer, and ginger was hot in the mouth, too. Et ego foui in Bohemia. There were inky fellows and bouncing girls then. Now there are only fine ladies, and respectable, God-fearing men of letters. It was while the twins were fashioning that I went down in summertime to live at Chertsey on the Thames. Chiefly, in order to be near to one, I had long admired Thomas Love Peacock, the friend of Shelley and the author of Headlong Hall. Greaky peaky, as they called him, on account of his prodigious knowledge of things and books Hellenic. I soon grew to love the dear old man, and sat at his feet like an obedient pupil in his green old-fashioned garden at Lower Halliford. To him I first read some of my undertones, getting many a wrap over the knuckles for my sacrilegious tampering with divine myths. What mercy could I expect from one who had never forgiven Johnny Keats for his frightful perversion of the sacred mystery of Indimion and Selene, and who was horrified at the base modernism of Shelley's Prometheus unbound. But to think of it, he had known Shelley and all the rest of the demigods, and his speech was golden with memories of them all. Dear old Pagan, wonderful in his death as in his life, when shortly before he died his housecourt fire, and the mild curate of the parish begged him to withdraw from the library of books he loved so well, he flatly refused to listen, and cried roundly in a line of vehement blank verse, by the immortal gods I will not stir. Footnote, I have given a detailed account of Peacock in my look-round literature. End of footnote. Under such auspices and with all the ardour of youth to help, my book or books progressed. Meantime I was breaking out into poetry in the magazines, and writing criticism by the yard. At last the time came when I remembered another friend with whom I had corresponded, and whose advice I thought I might now ask with some confidence. This was George Henry Lewis, to whom, when I was a boy in Glasgow, I had sent a bundle of manuscript with the blunt question, Am I or Am I not a poet? To my delight he had replied to me with a qualified affirmative, saying that in the productions he had discerned a real faculty, and perhaps a future poet. I say perhaps, he added, because I do not know your age, and because there are so many poetical blossoms which never come to fruit. He had, furthermore, advised me to write as much as I felt impelled to write, but to publish nothing at any rate for a couple of years. Three years had passed, and I had neither published anything, that is to say in book form, nor had I had any further communication with my kind correspondent. To Lewis then I wrote, reminding him of our correspondence, telling him that I had waited not two years but three, and that I now felt inclined to face the public. I soon received an answer, the result of which was that I went on Lewis's invitation to the Priory North Bank Regents Park, and met my friend and his partner, better known as George Elliot. But, as the novelists say, I am anticipating. Sick to death, David Gray had returned to the cottage of his father, the Handling Weaver, at Carkin Tilloch, and there had peacefully passed away, leaving as his legacy to the world the volume of beautiful poems published under the auspices of Lord Houghton. I knew of his death the hour he died. Awaking in the night, I was certain of my loss, and spoke of it long before the formal news reached me to a friend. This, by the way, but what is more to the purpose is that my first grief for a beloved comrade had expressed itself in the words which were to form the poem of my first book, Poet Gentle-hearted, Are You Then Departed? And have you ceased to dream the dream we loved of old so well? Has the deeply cherished aspiration perished? And are you happy, David, in that heaven where you dwell? Have you found the secret we so wildly sought for? And is your soul enswayed at last in the singing robes you fought for? Full of my dead friend, I spoke of him to Lewis and George Elliot, telling them the piteous story of his life and death. Both were deeply touched, and Lewis cried, Tell that story to the public. Which I did, immediately afterwards, in the Cornhill magazine. By this time I had my twins ready, and had discovered a publisher for one of them, undertones. The other idylls and legends of Inverburn was a ruggeder bantling, containing almost the first blank verse poems ever written in Scottish dialect. I selected one of the poems, Willie Baird, and showed it to Lewis. He expressed himself delighted and asked for more. I then showed him the two babes. Better and better, he wrote, publish a volume of such poems, and your position is assured. More than this, he at once found me a publisher, Mr. George Smith, of Messers, Smith and Elder, who offered me a good round sum, such it seemed to me then, for the copyright. Eventually, however, after Willie Baird had been published in the Cornhill, I withdrew the manuscript from Messers, Smith and Elder, and transferred it to Mr. Alexander Strawn, who offered me both more liberal terms and more enthusiastic appreciation. It was just after the appearance of my story of David Gray in the Cornhill, that I first met at the Priory North Bank, with Robert Browning. It was an odd and representative gathering of men, only one lady being present, the hostess, George Elliot. I was never much of a hero worshipper, but I had long been a sympathetic browning-ite, and I well remember George Elliot taking me aside after my first tete-a-tete with the poet, and saying, Well, what do you think of him? Does he come up to your ideal? He didn't quite, I must confess, but I afterwards learned to know him well, and to understand him better. He was delighted with my statement that one of Gray's wild ideas was to rush over to Florence and throw himself on the sympathy of Robert Browning, phantoms of these first books of mine, how they begin to rise around me. Faces of friends and counsellors that have flown for ever, the sibiline Marian Evans with her long, weird, dreamy face, Louis with his big, brow and keen, thoughtful eyes. Browning, pale, and spruce, his eye like a skipper's, cocked up at the weather. Peacock with his round, malifluous speech of the old Greeks. David Gray, great-eyed and beautiful like Shelly's ghost. Lord Houghton, with his warm, worldly smile and easy-fitting enthusiasm, where are they all now? Where are the roses of last summer, the snows of yesteryear? I passed by the priory today, and it looked like a great lonely tomb. In those days the house where I live now was not built. All up here, hamstered ways, was grass and fields. It was over these fields that Herbert Spencer and George Eliot used to walk on their way to Hampstead Heath. The sibil has gone, but the great philosopher still remains to brighten the sunshine. It was not my luck to know him then, would it had been, but he is my friend and neighbour in these latter days, and thanks to him I still get glimpses of the manners of the old gods. With the publication of my first two books I was fairly launched, I may say, on the stormy waters of literature. When the Atheneum told its readers that this was poetry and of a noble kind, and when Lewis vowed in the fortnightly review that even if I never wrote another line my place among the pastoral poets would be undisputed, I suppose I felt happy enough, far more happy than any praise could make me now. Poor little pygmy in a cockle-boat I thought creation was ringing with my name. I think I must have seemed rather conceited and bounceable, for I have a vivid remembrance of a fortnightly dinner at the Star and Garter Richmond when Antony Trollope angry with me for expressing a doubt about the poetical greatness of Horace wanted to fling a decanter at my head. It was about this time that an omniscient publisher, after an interview with me, exclaimed, the circumstance is historical, I don't like that young man, he talked to me as if he was God Almighty or Lord Byron. But in so a truth I never had the sort of conceit with which men credited me. I merely lacked gullibility, and saw at the first glance the whole unmistakable humbug and insincerity of the literary life. I think still that as a rule the profession of letters narrows the sympathy and walks the intelligence. When I saw the importance which a great man or woman could attach to a piece of perfunctory criticism, when I saw the care with which this eminent person humoured his reputation, and the anxiety with which that eminent person concealed his true character, I found my young illusions very rapidly fading. On one occasion, when George Elliott was very much pestered by an unknown lady, an insignificant individual who had thrust herself somewhat pertinaciously upon her, she turned to me and asked with a smile for my opinion. I gave it, rudely enough, to the effect that it was good for distinguished people to be reminded occasionally of how very small consequence they really were in the mighty life of the world. From that time until the present I have pursued the vocation into which fatal fortune during boyhood incontinently thrust me, and have subsisted ill sometimes, well sometimes, by a busy pen. I may therefore, with a certain experience, if with little authority, imitate those who have preceded me in giving reminiscences of their first literary beginnings, and offer a few words of advice to my younger brethren—to those persons, I mean, who are entering the profession of literature. To begin with, I entirely agree with Mr. Grant Allen in his recent avow that literature is the poorest and least satisfactory of all professions. I will go even further, and affirm that it is one of the least ennobling. With a fairly extensive knowledge of the writers of my own period, I can honestly say that I have scarcely met one individual who has not deteriorated morally by the pursuit of literary fame. For complete literary success among contemporaries it is imperative that a man should either have no real opinions, or be able to conceal such as he possesses, that he should have one eye on the market and the other on the public journals, that he should humbug himself into the delusion that book writing is the highest work in the universe, and that he should regulate his likes and dislikes by one law, that of expediency. If his nature is in arms against anything that is rotten in society or in literature itself, he must be silent. Above all, he must lay this solemn truth to heart that when the world speaks well of him, the world will demand the price of praise, and that price will possibly be his living soul. He may tinker, he may trim, he may succeed, he may be buried in Westminster Abbey, he may hear before he dies all the people saying how good and great he is, how perfect is his art, how gloriously he embodies the tendency of his time. But he will know all the same that the price has been paid, and that his living soul has gone to furnish that whitewashed sepulchre a blameless reputation. Footnote. O those tendencies of one's time, O those dismal phantoms conjured up by the blatant book-taster and the indolent reviewer, how many a poor soul that would feign have been honest have they bewildered into the slough of despond and the bog of beautiful ideas. R. B. End of footnote. For one other thing also the near-fighting literature had better be prepared. He will never be able to subsist by creative writing unless it so happens that the form of expression he chooses is popular in form, fiction, for example, and even in that case the work he does, if he is to live by it, must be in harmony with the social and artistic status quo. Revolt of any kind is always disagreeable. Three-fourths of the success of Lord Tennyson, to take an example, was due to the fact that this thine poet regarded life and all its phenomena from the standpoint of the English public school, that he ethically and artistically embodied the sentiments of our excellent middle-class education. His great American contemporary Whitman, in some respects the most commanding spirit of this generation, gained only a few disciples and was entirely misunderstood and neglected by contemporary criticism. Another prosperous writer to whom I have already eluded, George Eliot, enjoyed enormous popularity in her lifetime, while the most strenuous and passionate novelist of her period, Charles Reed, was entirely distanced by her in the immediate race for fame. In literature, as in all things, manners and costume are most important. The hallmark of contemporary success is perfect respectability. It is not respectable to be too candid on any subject, religious, moral or political. It is very respectable to say or imply that this country is the best of all possible countries, that war is a noble institution, that the Protestant religion is grandly liberal and that social evils are only diversified forms of social good. Above all, to be respectable one must have beautiful ideas. Beautiful ideas are the very best stock in trade a young writer can begin with. They are indispensable to every complete literary outfit. Without them the shortcut to Parnassus will never be discovered, even though one starts from rugby. End of Undertones and Iddils and Legends of Inverburn by Robert Buchanan