injustice. But
pray, what of Charlotte Bronte? Think of that grey, pinched life, the
latter years of which would have been so brightened had Charlotte Bronte
received but, let us say, one third of what, in the same space of time,
the publisher gained by her books. I know all about this; alas! no man
better. None the less do I loathe and sicken at the manifold baseness,
the vulgarity unutterable, which, as a result of the new order, is
blighting our literary life. It is not easy to see how, in such an
atmosphere, great and noble books can ever again come into being. May
it, perhaps, be hoped that once again the multitude will be somehow
touched with disgust?--that the market for "literary" news of this
costermonger sort will some day fail?

Dickens. Why, there too was a disclosure of literary methods. Did not
Forster make known to all and sundry exactly how Dickens' work was done,
and how the bargains for its production were made? The multitudinous
public saw him at his desk, learnt how long he sat there, were told that
he could not get on without having certain little ornaments before his
eyes, and that blue ink and a quill pen were indispensable to his
writing; and did all this information ever chill the loyalty of a single
reader? There was a difference, in truth, between the picture of Charles
Dickens sitting down to a chapter of his current novel, and that of the
broad-based Trollope doing his so many words to the fifteen minutes.
Trollope, we know, wronged himself by the tone and manner of his
reminiscences; but that tone and manner indicated an inferiority of mind,
of nature. Dickens--though he died in the endeavour to increase (not for
himself) an already ample fortune, disastrous influence of his time and
class--wrought with an artistic ingenuousness and fervour such as
Trollope could not even conceive. Methodical, of course, he was; no long
work of prose fiction was ever brought into existence save by methodical
labour; but we know that there was no measuring of