ures, that we ought
not to grow morose and solitary; there is an abundance of excuses that
can be made; but the artist and the writer ought to realize that their
duty to the world is to perceive what is beautiful and to express it as
resolutely, as attractively as they can; if a writer can write a good
book, he can talk in its pages to a numerous audience; and he is right
to save up his best thoughts for his readers, rather than to let them
flow away in diffuse conversation. Of course a writer of fiction is
bound to make the observation of varieties of temperament a duty; it is
his material; if he becomes isolated and self-absorbed, his work
becomes narrow and mannerized; and it is true, too, that, with most
writers, the collision of mind with mind is what produces the brightest
sparks.

And then to step into a still wider field, there is no sort of doubt
that the formation of reasonable habits, of method, of punctuality, is
a duty, not from an exalted point of view, but because it makes
enormously for the happiness and convenience of every one about us. In
the old-fashioned story-books a prodigious value, perhaps an
exaggerated value, was set upon time; one was told to redeem the time,
whatever that might mean. The ideal mother of the family, in the little
books which I used to read in my childhood, was a lady who appeared
punctually at breakfast, and had a bunch of keys hanging at her girdle.
Breakfast over, she paid a series of visits, looked into the larder,
weighed out stores, and then settled down to some solid reading or
embroidered a fire-screen; the afternoon would be spent in visits of
benevolence, carrying portions of the midday dinner to her poorer
neighbours; the evening would be given to working at the fire-screen
again, while some one read aloud. Somehow it is not an attractive
picture, though it need not have been so dull as it appears. The point
is whether the solid reading had a useful effect or not. In the books I
have in view, it generally led the materfamilias into having an undue
respect for correct information, and a pharisaical contempt for people
who indulged their fancy. In Harry and Lucy, for instance, Lucy, who is
the only human figure in the book, is perpetually being snubbed by the
terrible hard-headed Harry, with his desperate interest in machinery,
by the repellent father who delights to explain the laws of gravity and
the parabola described by the stone which Harry throws. What was
unde