satisfaction of a fastidious public.

The first is the beginning, the second the middle, and the third is the
end.

The painter who, in times of yore, exposed his canvas to universal
criticism, and found, to his mortification, that there was not a
particle of his composition which had not been pronounced defective by
one pseudo-critic or another, did not receive severer castigation than I
have experienced from the _unsolicited_ remarks of "d----d good-natured
friends."

"I like your first and second volume," said a tall, long-chinned,
short-sighted blue, dressed in yellow, peering into my face, as if her
eyes were magnifying glasses, and she was obtaining the true focus of
vision, "but you fall off in your last, which is all about that _nasty_
line-of-battle ship."

"I don't like your plot, sir," bawls out in a stentorian voice an
elderly gentleman; "I don't like your plot, sir," repeated he with an
air of authority, which he had long assumed, from supposing because
people would not be at the trouble of contradicting his opinions, that
they were incontrovertible--"there is nothing but death."

"Death, my dear sir," replied I, as if I was hailing the lookout man at
the mast-head, and hoping to soften him with my intentional bull; "is
not death, sir, a true picture of human life?"

"Ay, ay," growled he, either not hearing or not _taking_; "it's all very
well, but--there's too much killing in it."