at you know the end of it, it will certainly
interest the reader.

The manner in which a good story grows under the hand is so remarkable,
that no tropic vegetation can show the like of it. For, consider, when
you have got your germ--the mere idea, not half a dozen lines
perhaps--which is to form your plot, how small a thing it is compared
with, say, the thousand pages which it has to occupy in the three-volume
novel! Yet to the story-teller the germ is everything. When I was a very
young man--a quarter of a century ago, alas!--and had very little
experience in these matters, I was reading on a coachbox (for I read
everywhere in those days) an account of some gigantic trees; one of them
was described as sound outside, but within, for many feet, a mass of
rottenness and decay. If a boy should climb up birdsnesting into the
fork of it, thought I, he might go down feet first and hands overhead,
and never be heard of again. How inexplicable too, as well as
melancholy, such a disappearance would be! Then, 'as when a great
thought strikes along the brain and flushes all the cheek,' it struck me
what an appropriate end it would be--with fear (lest he should turn up
again) instead of hope for the fulcrum to move the reader--for a bad
character of a novel. Before I had left the coachbox I had thought out
'Lost Sir Massingberd.'

The character was drawn from life, but unfortunately from hearsay; he
had flourished--to the great terror of his neighbours--two generations
before me, so that I had to be indebted to others for his portraiture,
which was a great disadvantage. It was necessary that the lost man
should be an immense scoundrel to prevent pity being excited by the
catastrophe, and at that time I did not know any very wicked people. The
book was a successful one, but it needs no critic to point out how much
better the story might have been told. The interest in the gentleman,
buried upright in his oak coffin, is inartistically weakened by other
sources of excitement; like an extravagant cook, the young author is apt
to be too lavish with his materials, and in after days, when the larder
is more difficult to fill, he bitterly regrets it. The representation of
a past time I also found it very difficult to compass, and I am
convinced that for any writer to attempt such a thing, when he can avoid
it, is an error in judgment. The author who undertakes to resuscitate
and clothe with flesh and blood the dry bones of his ancestors,