enmity he provoked, the calumnies that assailed him. Sometimes he was
silent, but sometimes he retorted. Like a soldier who serves a cause,
he believed that when the cause was injured in his person, the weapons
confided to his hands might be wielded without fear and without
reproach. Gradually he became feared as well as known. And while many
abused him, none could contemn.

It would not suit the design of this work to follow Maltravers step by
step in his course. I am only describing the principal events, not the
minute details, of his intellectual life. Of the character of his works
it will be enough to say that, whatever their faults, they were
original--they were his own. He did not write according to copy, nor
compile from commonplace books. He was an artist, it is true,--for what
is genius itself but art? but he took laws, and harmony, and order, from
the great code of Truth and Nature: a code that demands intense and
unrelaxing study--though its first principles are few and simple: that
study Maltravers did not shrink from. It was a deep love of truth that
made him a subtle and searching analyst, even in what the dull world
considers trifles; for he knew that nothing in literature is in itself
trifling--that it is often but a hairsbreadth that divides a truism from
a discovery. He was the more original, because he sought rather after
the True than the New. No two minds are ever the same; and therefore
any man who will give us fairly and frankly the results of his own
impressions, uninfluenced by the servilities of imitation, will be
original. But it was not from originality, which really made his
predominant merit, that Maltravers derived his reputation, for his
originality was not of that species which generally dazzles the
vulgar--it was not extravagant nor /bizarre/--he affected no system and
no school. Many authors of his day seemed more novel and /unique/ to
the superficial. Profound and durable invention proceeds by subtle and