n one occasion, when George Eliot was very much
pestered by an unknown lady, an insignificant individual, who had thrust
herself somewhat pertinaciously upon her, she turned to me and asked,
with a smile, for my opinion. I gave it, rudely enough, to the effect
that it was good for 'distinguished people' to be reminded occasionally
of how very small consequence they really were, in the mighty life of
the World!

From that time until the present I have pursued the vocation into which
fatal Fortune, during boyhood, incontinently thrust me, and have
subsisted, ill sometimes, well sometimes, by a busy pen. I may,
therefore, with a certain experience, if with little authority, imitate
those who have preceded me in giving reminiscences of their first
literary beginnings, and offer a few words of advice to my younger
brethren--to those persons, I mean, who are entering the profession of
Literature. To begin with, I entirely agree with Mr. Grant Allen in his
recent avowal that Literature is the poorest and least satisfactory of
all professions; I will go even further, and affirm that it is one of
the least ennobling. With a fairly extensive knowledge of the writers of
my own period, I can honestly say that I have scarcely met one
individual who has not deteriorated morally by the pursuit of literary
Fame. For complete literary success among contemporaries, it is
imperative that a man should either have no real opinions, or be able to
conceal such as he possesses, that he should have one eye on the market
and the other on the public journals, that he should humbug himself into
the delusion that book-writing is the highest work in the Universe, and
that he should regulate his likes and dislikes by one law, that of
expediency. If his nature is in arms against anything that is rotten in
Society or in Literature itself, he must be silent. Above all, he must
lay this solemn truth to heart, that when the World speaks well of him
the World will demand the _price_ of praise, and that price will
possibly be his living Soul. He may tinker, he may trim, he may succeed,
he may be buried in Westminster Abbey, he may hear before he dies all
the people saying, 'How good and great he is! how perfect is his art!
how gloriously he embodies the Tendencies of his Time!'[H] but he will
know all the same that the price has been paid, and that his living Soul
has gone, to furnish that whitewashed Sepulchre, a Blameless Reputation.

[Illustration: MR.