And yet--for, even as Must implants distaste, so does Can't stir sweet
longings--how eagerly would I devour these books within books! What
fun, what a queer emotion, to fish out from a fourpenny-box, in a
windy by-street, WALTER LORRAINE, by ARTHUR PENDENNIS, or PASSION
FLOWERS, by ROSA BUNION! I suppose poor Rosa's muse, so fair and so
fervid in Rosa's day, would seem a trifle fatigued now; but what
allowances one would make! Lord Steyne said of WALTER LORRAINE that it
was `very clever and wicked.' I fancy we should apply neither epithet
now. Indeed, I have always suspected that Pen's maiden effort may have
been on a plane with `The Great Hoggarty Diamond.' Yet I vow would I
not skip a line of it.

WHO PUT BACK THE CLOCK? is another work which I especially covet. Poor
Gideon Forsyth! He was abominably treated, as Stevenson relates, in
the matter of that grand but grisly piano; and I have always hoped
that perhaps, in the end, as a sort of recompense, Fate ordained that
the novel he had anonymously written should be rescued from oblivion
and found by discerning critics to be not at all bad.

"He had never acknowledged it, or only to some intimate friends while
it was still in proof; after its appearance and alarming failure, the
modesty of the author had become more pressing, and the secret was now
likely to be better kept than that of the authorship of `Waverley.'"

Such an humiliation as Gideon's is the more poignant to me because it
is so rare in English fiction. In nine cases out of ten, a book within
a book is an immediate, an immense success.

On the whole, our novelists have always tended to optimism--especially