erity might have
transfixed it and shown her to herself even then a tossing vessel as to
the spirit, far away from that firm land she trod so bravely.

Descending from the woody heights upon London, Diana would have said
that her only anxiety concerned young Mr. Arthur Rhodes, whose position
she considered precarious, and who had recently taken a drubbing for
venturing to show a peep of his head, like an early crocus, in the
literary market. Her ANTONIA'S last book had been reviewed obediently
to smart taps from the then commanding baton of Mr. Tonans, and Mr.
Whitmonby's choice picking of specimens down three columns of his paper.
A Literary Review (Charles Rainer's property) had suggested that perhaps
'the talented authoress might be writing too rapidly'; and another,
actuated by the public taste of the period for our 'vigorous homely
Saxon' in one and two syllable words, had complained of a 'tendency to
polysyllabic phraseology.' The remainder, a full majority, had sounded
eulogy with all their band-instruments, drum, trumpet, fife, trombone.
Her foregoing work had raised her to Fame, which is the Court of a
Queen when the lady has beauty and social influence, and critics are
her dedicated courtiers, gaping for the royal mouth to be opened, and
reserving the kicks of their independent manhood for infamous outsiders,
whom they hoist in the style and particular service of pitchforks. They
had fallen upon a little volume of verse, 'like a body of barn-door hens
on a stranger chick,' Diana complained; and she chid herself angrily
for letting it escape her forethought to propitiate them on the author's
behalf. Young Rhodes was left with scarce a feather; and what remained
to him appeared a preposterous ornament for the decoration of a
shivering and welted poet. He laughed, or tried the mouth of laughter.
ANTONIA's literary conscience was vexed at the different treatment she
had met and so imperatively needed that the reverse of it would have
threatened the smooth sailing of her costly household. A merry-go-round
of creditors required a corresponding whirligig of receipts.

She felt mercenary, debased by comparison with the well-scourged
verse-mason, Orpheus of the untenanted city, who had done his publishing
ingenuously for glory: a good instance of the comic-pathetic. She wrote
to Emma, begging her to take him in at Copsley for a few days: 'I told
you I had no troubles. I am really troubled about this poor boy. He has
v