ed
on one of the tables; an illustrated edition of Cowper's lively and
thrilling poems; a volume of Rambles in Scotland, with copper-plate
engravings of "Melrose by night," and Glasgow Cathedral, and Ben Nevis,
and other scenic and architectural glories of North Britain; a couple
of volumes of _Punch_, and an illustrated "Vicar of Wakefield;" and
what more could elevated taste demand in the way of literature? Nobody
ever read the books; but Mrs. Sheldon's visitors were sometimes glad to
take refuge in the Scottish scenery and the pictorial Vicar during that
interval of dulness and indigestion which succeeds a middle-class
dinner. Georgy read a great many books; but they were all novels,
procured from the Bayswater branch of a fashionable circulating
library, and were condemned unread by Mr. Sheldon, who considered all
works of fiction perfectly equal in demerit, and stigmatised them, in a
general way, as "senseless trash." He had tried to read novels in the
dreary days of his Bloomsbury probation; but he had found that the
heroes of them were impracticable beings, who were always talking of
honour and chivalry, and always sacrificing their own interests in an
utterly preposterous manner; and he had thrown aside story after story
in disgust.

"Give me a book that is something like life, and I'll read it," he
exclaimed impatiently; "but I can't swallow the high-flown prosings of
impossibly virtuous inanities."

One day, indeed, he had been struck by the power of a book, a book
written by a certain Frenchman called Balzac. He had been riveted by
the hideous cynicism, the supreme power of penetration into the vilest
corners of wicked hearts; and he flung the book from him at last with
an expression of unmitigated admiration.

"That man knows his fellows," he cried, "and is not hypocrite enough to
conceal his knowledge, or to trick out his puppets in the tinsel and
rags of false sentiment in order that critics and public may cry, 'See,
what noble instincts, what generous impulses, what unbounded sympathy
for his fellow-creatures this man has!' This Frenchman is an artist,
and is not afraid to face the difficulties of his art. What a scoundrel
this Philippe Bridau is! And after wallowing in the gutter, he lives to
bespatter his virtuous brother with the mire from his carriage wheels.
That is _real_ life. Your English novelist would have made his villain
hang himself with the string of his waistcoat in a condemned cell,
wh