transcendent that they can afford to dispense with 'plot;' their humour,
their pathos, and their delineation of human nature are amply
sufficient, without any such meretricious attraction; whereas our too
ambitious young friend is in the position of the needy knife-grinder,
who has not only no story to tell, but in lieu of it only holds up his
coat and breeches 'torn in the scuffle'--the evidence of his desperate
and ineffectual struggles with literary composition. I have known such
an aspirant to instance Miss Gaskell's 'Cranford' as a parallel to the
backboneless flesh-and-bloodless creation of his own immature fancy, and
to recommend the acceptance of the latter upon the ground of their
common rejection of startling plot and dramatic situation. The two
compositions have certainly _that_ in common; and the flawless diamond
has some things, such as mere sharpness and smoothness, in common with
the broken beer-bottle.

Many young authors of the class I have in my mind, while more modest as
respects their own merits, are even still less so as regards their
expectations from others. 'If you will kindly furnish me with a
subject,' so runs a letter now before me, 'I am sure I could do very
well; my difficulty is that I never can think of anything to write
about. Would you be so good as to oblige me with a plot for a novel?' It
would have been infinitely more reasonable of course, and much cheaper,
for me to grant it, if the applicant had made a request for my watch and
chain;[6] but the marvel is that folks should feel any attraction
towards a calling for which Nature has denied them even the raw
materials. It is true that there are some great talkers who have
manifestly nothing to say, but they don't ask their hearers to supply
them with a topic of conversation in order to be set agoing.

[6] To compare small things with great, I remember Sir Walter