I did a sneer from an acquaintance of mine who was in the habit of
borrowing money from me. He was a painter, whose pictures were never
sold because he never worked hard enough to know how to draw, and it
came to my ears indirectly that he had said that "he would rather
live the life of a medieval ascetic than condescend to the
degradation of scribbling a dozen columns weekly of utter trash on
subjects with which he had no concern." At that very moment he owed
me five pounds. God knows that I admitted my dozen columns to be
utter trash, but it ought to have been forgiven by those who saw that
I was struggling to save myself from the streets and to keep a roof
over my head. Degraded, however, as I might be, I could not get down
to the "graphic and personal," for it meant nothing less than the
absolutely false. I therefore contrived to exist on the one letter,
which, excepting the mechanical labour of writing a second, took up
as much of my time as if I had to write two.

Never, but once or twice at the most, did my labours meet with the
slightest recognition beyond payment. Once I remember that I accused
a member of a discreditable manoeuvre to consume the time of the
House, and as he represented a borough in my district, he wrote to
the editor denying the charge. The editor without any inquiry--and I
believe I was mistaken--instantly congratulated me on having
"scored." At another time, when Parliament was not sitting, I
ventured, by way of filling up my allotted space, to say a word on
behalf of a now utterly forgotten novel. I had a letter from the
authoress thanking me, but alas! the illusion vanished. I was
tempted by this one novel to look into others which I found she had
written, and I discovered that they were altogether silly. The
attraction of the one of which I thought so highly, was due not to
any real merit which it possessed, but to something I had put into