seasons if he lives in the literary atmosphere. The actor who works in
the theatre at night, and lives only among his peers during the day,
ends by becoming a mummer even in private life; a teacher who does not
systematically shake off the taint of the school is among the most
tiresome of creatures; the man who hurries from race-meeting to
race-meeting seems to lose the power of talking about anything save
horses and bets; and the literary man cannot hope to escape the usual
fate of those who narrow their horizon. When a man once settles down
as "literary" and nothing else, he does not take long in reaching
complete nullity. His power of emitting strings of grammatical
sentences remains; but the sentences are only exudations from an awful
blankness--he is written out. The rush after money has latterly
brought some of our most exquisite writers of fiction into a condition
which is truly lamentable; the very beauties which marked their early
work have become garish and vulgarised, and, in running through the
early chapters of a new novel, a reader of fair intelligence discovers
that he could close the book and tell the story for himself. One
artist cannot get away from sentimental merchant-seamen and lovely
lady-passengers; another must always bring in an infant that is cast
on shore near a primitive village; another must have for characters a
roguish trainer of race-horses, an honest jockey, a dark villain who
tampers with race-horses, and a dashing young man who is saved from
ruin by betting on a race; another drags in a surprisingly
lofty-minded damsel who grows up pure and noble amid the most
repulsive surroundings; another can never forget the lost will;
another depends on a mock-modest braggart who kills scores of people
in a humorous way. The mould remains the same in each case, although
there may be casual variations in the hue of the material poured out
and moulded. All these forlorn folk are either verging toward the
written-out condition or have reached the last level of flatness. Like