only by virtue of their style and matter, but because of a quality
they possess which I must call _universal_--a quality which appeals
with equal force to readers of every rank, and which will procure for
them as wide a popularity five hundred years hence as they enjoy
to-day. I call them novels, but they are really prose-poems. The
novel,' he continued, rising for an instant to impersonal heights,
'the novel is the literary form or expression of my period, as the
drama was that of Shakespeare's, the epic of Homer's. Do you follow
me? Ah, here is a copy of "Crispin Dorr"--here is "The Card Dealer."
Take them and read them, and return them when you have finished. Being
author's copies, they possess an exceptional value. This is my
autograph upon the fly-leaf. This is a photograph of my wife. She is a
good woman, but has no great literary culture, and we are not so happy
together as I could wish. Men of commanding parts seldom make good
husbands, and I committed the imprudence of marrying very young. My
wife, you see, belongs to that class of society from which I have
risen. I am the son of a wine merchant, yet I dine with peers, and
have been favoured with smiles from peeresses. My wife has not kept
pace with me. This is my little girl--our only child--my daughter
Judith. Here is the _Illustrated Gazette_ with the portrait of
myself.'

Some of us in the Latin Quarter found the man's egotism insupportable,
and gave him a wide berth. Others, more numerous, among them the
irrepressible Chalks, made it an object of derision, and would
exhaust their ingenuity in efforts to lead him on, and entice him into
more and more egregious exhibitions of it; while, if they did not
laugh in his face, they took, at least, no slightest pains to conceal
their jubilant interchange of winks and nudges.