and certainly should not be disheartened by our old experience.
But there be few beginners of this mark, most begin so feebly because
they begin so fearfully. They are already too discouraged, and can
scarce do themselves justice. It is easier to write more or less well
and agreeably when you are certain of being published and paid, at least,
than to write well when a dozen rejected manuscripts are cowering (as
Theocritus says) in your chest, bowing their pale faces over their chilly
knees, outcast, hungry, repulsed from many a door. To write excellently,
brightly, powerfully, with these poor unwelcomed wanderers, returned
MSS., in your possession, is difficult indeed. It might be wiser to do
as M. Guy de Maupassant is rumoured to have done, to write for seven
years, and shew your essays to none but a mentor as friendly severe as M.
Flaubert. But all men cannot have such mentors, nor can all afford so
long an unremunerative apprenticeship. For some the better plan is _not_
to linger on the bank, and take tea and good advice, as Keats said, but
to plunge at once in mid-stream, and learn swimming of necessity.

One thing, perhaps, most people who succeed in letters so far as to keep
themselves alive and clothed by their pens will admit, namely, that their
early rejected MSS. _deserved to be rejected_. A few days ago there came
to the writer an old forgotten beginner's attempt by himself. Whence it
came, who sent it, he knows not; he had forgotten its very existence. He
read it with curiosity; it was written in a very much better hand than
his present scrawl, and was perfectly legible. But _readable_ it was
not. There was a great deal of work in it, on an out of the way topic,
and the ideas were, perhaps, not quite without novelty at the time of its
composition. But it was cramped and thin, and hesitating between several
manners; above all it was uncommonly dull. If it ever was sent to an
editor, as I presume it must have been, that editor was trebly justified
in declining it. On the other hand, to be egotistic, I have known
editors reject the attempts of those old days, and afterwards express
lively delight in them when they struggled into print, somehow,
somewhere. These worthy men did not even know that they had despised and
refused what they came afterwards rather to enjoy.

Editors and publishers, these keepers of the gates of success, are not
infallible, but their opinion of a beginner's work is far mor