er, but your hero--you know I always speak my
mind--is rather a duffer. You should go into the world more, and
sketch from life. The Vice-Chancellor gave me great pleasure by
speaking of your early poems very highly the other day, and I assure
you it was quite a drop down for me, to find that he was referring to
some other writer of the same name. Of course I did not undeceive
him. I wish, my dear fellow, you would write stories in one volume
instead of three. You write a _short_ story capitally.

'Yours ever,

'JACK.'

Tom the surgeon belongs to that very objectionable class of humanity,
called, by ancient writers, wags:

'MY DEAR DICK,

'I cannot help writing to thank you for the relief afforded to me by
the perusal of your last volume. I had been suffering from neuralgia,
and every prescription in the Pharmacopaeia for producing sleep had
failed until I tried _that_. Dear Maggie [an odious woman, who calls
novels "light literature," and affects to be blue] read it to me
herself, so it was given every chance; but I think you must
acknowledge that it was a little spun out. Maggie assures me--I have
not read them myself, for you know what little time I have for such
things--that the first two volumes, with the exception of the
characters of the hero and heroine, which she pronounces to be rather
feeble, are first-rate. Why don't you write two-volume novels? There
is always something in analogy: reflect how seldom Nature herself
produces three at a birth: when she does, it is only two, at most,
which survive. We shall look forward to your next effort with much
interest, but we hope you will give more time and pains to it.
Remember what Horace says upon this subject (He has no more knowledge
of Horace than he has of Sanscrit, but he has read the quotation in
that vile review in the _Scourge_.) Maggie thinks you live too
luxuriously: if your expenses were less you would not be compelled to
write so much, and you would do it better. Excuse this well-meant
advice from an elder brother.

'Yours always,

'Tom.'

'One's sisters, and one's cousins, and one's aunts' also write in more
or less the same style, though, to do their sex justice, less
offensively. 'If you were to go abroad, my dear Dick,' says one, 'it
would expand your mind. There is nothing to blame in your last
production, which strikes me (what I could understand of it at least,
for some