ly supposed to have a theological tendency.
Then again, in the very week in which my book saw the light, 'Lothair'
appeared, and for the time being swamped everything. All the world read
'Lothair,' all the world talked about it, and all the newspapers and
reviews dealt with it, to the exclusion of the products of the smaller
fry. Later on, 'A Life's Atonement' was handsomely reviewed, and was
indeed, as I am disposed to think, praised a good deal beyond its
merits. But it lay a dead weight on the hands of its original
publishers, until Messrs. Chatto & Windus expressed a wish to
incorporate it in their Piccadilly Series. The negotiations between the
two houses were easily completed, the stock was transferred from one
establishment to the other, the volumes were stripped of their old
binding and dressed anew, and with this novel impetus the story reached
a second edition in three-volume form. It brought me almost immediately
two commissions, and by the time that they were completed I had grown
into a professional novel-writer.

[Illustration: THE STOCK WAS TRANSFERRED]

[Illustration: SOME NOVELS]

'_A ROMANCE OF TWO WORLDS_'

BY MARIE CORELLI

It is an unromantic thing for an author to have had no literary
vicissitudes. One cannot expect to be considered interesting, unless one
has come up to London with the proverbial solitary 'shilling,' and gone
about hungry and footsore, begging from one hard-hearted publisher's
house to another with one's perpetually rejected manuscript under one's
arm. One ought to have consumed the 'midnight oil;' to have 'coined
one's heart's blood' (to borrow the tragic expression of a contemporary
gentleman-novelist); to have sacrificed one's self-respect by
metaphorically crawling on all-fours to the critical faculty; and to
have become aesthetically cadaverous and blear-eyed through the action of
inspired dyspepsia. Now, I am obliged to confess that I have done none
of these things, which, to quote the Prayer-book, I ought to have done.
I have had no difficulty in making my career or winning my public. And I
attribute my good fortune to the simple fact that I have always tried to
write straight from my own heart to the hearts of others, regardless of
opinions and indifferent to results. My object in writing has never
been, and never will be, to concoct a mere story which shall bring me in
a certain amount of cash or notoriety, but solely because I wish to say
something which, b