* * * * *

Yet, I maintain, Dr. Faustus was a weak creature. He begged to be given
another and wholly different chance to linger with beauty. How much
nobler the magnificent courage of the veteran novel-reader, who in the
old age of his service, asks only that he may be permitted to do again
all that he has done, blindly, humbly, loyally, as before.

Don't I know? Have I not been there? It is no child's play, the life of
a man who--paraphrasing the language of Spartacus, the much neglected
hero of the ages--has met upon the printed page every shape of perilous
adventure and dangerous character that the broad empire of fiction could
furnish, and never yet lowered his arm. Believe me it is no carpet duty
to have served on the British privateers in Guiana, under Commodore
Kingsley, alongside of Salvation Yeo; to have been a loyal member of
Thuggee and cast the scarf for Bowanee; to have watched the tortures of
Beatrice Cenci (pronounced as written in honest English, and I spit upon
the weaklings of the service who imagine that any freak of woman called
Bee-ah-treech-y Chon-chy could have endured the agonies related of that
sainted lady)--to have watched those tortures, I say, without breaking
down; to have fought under the walls of Acre with Richard Coeur de Lion;
to have crawled, amid rats and noxious vapors, with Jean Valjean through
the sewers of Paris; to have dragged weary miles through the snow with
Uncas, Chief of the Mohicans; to have lived among wild beasts with Morok
the lion tamer; to have charged with the impis of Umslopogaas; to have
sailed before the mast with Vanderdecken, spent fourteen gloomy years
in the next cell to Edmund Dantes, ferreted out the murders in the Rue
Morgue, advised Monsieur Le Cocq and given years of life's prime in
tedious professional assistance to that anointed idiot and pestiferous
scoundrel, Tittlebat Titmouse! Equally, of course, it has not been all