name. That work which, in the fair retirement of Temple Grove it had so
pleased him to compose--in every page and every thought of which
Florence had been consulted--which was so inseparably associated with
her image, and glorified by the light of her kindred genius--was just
published. It had been completed long since; but the publisher had, for
some excellent reason of the craft, hitherto delayed its appearance.
Maltravers knew nothing of its publication; he had meant, after his
return to town, to have sent to forbid its appearance; but his thoughts
of late had crushed everything else out of his memory--he had forgotten
its existence. And now, in all the pomp and parade of authorship, it
was sent into the world! /Now/, /now/, when it was like an indecent
mockery of the Bed of Death--a sacrilege, an impiety! There is a
terrible disconnection between the author and the man---the author's
life and the man's life--the eras of visible triumph may be those of the
most intolerable, though unrevealed and unconjectured anguish. The book
that delighted us to compose may first appear in the hour when all
things under the sun are joyless. This had been Ernest Maltravers's
most favoured work. It had been conceived in a happy hour of great
ambition--it had been executed with that desire of truth, which, in the
mind of genius, becomes ART. How little in the solitary hours stolen
from sleep had he thought of self, and that labourer's hire called
"fame!" how had he dreamt that he was promulgating secrets to make his
kind better, and wiser, and truer to the great aims of life! How had
Florence, and Florence alone, understood the beatings of his heart in
every page! /And now/!--it so chanced that the work was reviewed in the
paper he read--it was not only a hostile criticism, it was a personally
abusive diatribe, a virulent invective. All the motives that can darken
or defile were ascribed to him. All the mean spite of some mean mind
was sputtered forth. Had the writer known the awful blow that awaited
Maltravers at that time, it is not in man's nature but that he would