with his own identity, lives in each, and almost looks upon the world
with its infinite objects as a part of his individual being.
Afterwards, as he tames down, he withdraws his forces into the citadel,
but he still has a knowledge of, and an interest in, the land they once
covered. He understands other people, for he has lived in other
people--the dead and the living;--fancied himself now Brutus and now
Caesar, and thought how /he/ should act in almost every imaginable
circumstance of life.

Thus, when he begins to paint human characters, essentially different
from his own, his knowledge comes to him almost intuitively. It is as
if he were describing the mansions in which he himself has formerly
lodged, though for a short time. Hence in great writers of History--of
Romance--of the Drama--the /gusto/ with which they paint their
personages; their creations are flesh and blood, not shadows or
machines.

Maltravers was at first, then, an egotist, in the matter of his rude and
desultory sketches--in the manner, as I said before, he was careless and
negligent, as men will be who have not yet found that expression is an
art. Still those wild and valueless essays--those rapt and secret
confessions of his own heart--were a delight to him. He began to taste
the transport, the intoxication of an author. And, oh, what a luxury is
there in that first love of the Muse! that process by which we give
palpable form to the long-intangible visions which have flitted across
us;--the beautiful ghost of the Ideal within us, which we invoke in the
Gadara of our still closets, with the wand of the simple pen!

It was early noon, the day after he had formed his acquaintance with the
De Montaignes, that Maltravers sat in his favourite room;--the one he