precaution in favour of failure that untutored inexperience can suggest,
it becomes plain that education in ill-success, is really a popular want.
In the following remarks some broad general principles, making disaster
almost inevitable, will first be offered, and then special methods of
failing in all special departments of letters will be ungrudgingly
communicated. It is not enough to attain failure, we should deserve it.
The writer, by way of insuring complete confidence, would modestly
mention that he has had ample opportunities of study in this branch of
knowledge. While sifting for five or six years the volunteered
contributions to a popular periodical, he has received and considered
some hundredweights of manuscript. In all these myriad contributions he
has not found thirty pieces which rose even to the ordinary dead level of
magazine work. He has thus enjoyed unrivalled chances of examining such
modes of missing success as spontaneously occur to the human intellect,
to the unaided ingenuity of men, women, and children. {1}

He who would fail in literature cannot begin too early to neglect his
education, and to adopt every opportunity of not observing life and
character. None of us is so young but that he may make himself perfect
in writing an illegible hand. This method, I am bound to say, is too
frequently overlooked. Most manuscripts by ardent literary volunteers
are fairly legible. On the other hand there are novelists, especially
ladies, who not only write a hand wholly declining to let itself be
deciphered, but who fill up the margins with interpolations, who write
between the lines, and who cover the page with scratches running this way
and that, intended to direct the attention to after-thoughts inserted
here and there in corners and on the backs of sheets. To pin in scraps
of closely written paper and backs of envelopes adds to the security for
failure, and produces a rich anger in the publisher's reader or the
editor.