letters: he was of all men the most imitative.
Shakespeare himself, the imperial, proceeds directly from a school. It
is only from a school that we can expect to have good writers, it is
almost invariably from a school that great writers, these lawless
exceptions, issue. Nor is there anything here that should astonish the
considerate. Before he can tell what cadences he truly prefers, the
student should have tried all that are possible; before he can choose
and preserve a fitting key of language, he should long have practised
the literary scales; and it is only after years of such gymnastic that
he can sit down at last, legions of words swarming to his call, dozens
of turns of phrase simultaneously bidding for his choice, and he himself
knowing what he wants to do and (within the narrow limit of a man's
ability) able to do it.

And it is the great point of these imitations that there still shines
beyond the student's reach his inimitable model. Let him try as he
please, he is still sure of failure; and it is a very old and a very
true saying that failure is the only highroad to success. I must have
had some disposition to learn; for I clear-sightedly condemned my own
performances. I liked doing them indeed; but when they were done, I
could see they were rubbish. In consequence, I very rarely showed them
even to my friends; and such friends as I chose to be my confidants I
must have chosen well, for they had the friendliness to be quite plain
with me. "Padding," said one. Another wrote: "I cannot understand why
you do lyrics so badly." No more could I! Thrice I put myself in the way
of a more authoritative rebuff, by sending a paper to a magazine. These
were returned; and I was not surprised or even pained. If they had not
been looked at, as (like all amateurs) I suspected was the case, there
was no good in repeating the experiment; if they had been looked
at--well, then I had not yet learned to write, and I must keep on
learning and living. Lastly, I had a piece of good fortune which is the
occasion of this paper, and by which I was able to see my literature in
print, and to measure experimentally how far I stood from the favour of
the public.

II

The Speculative Society is a body of some antiquity, and has counted
among its members Scott, Brougham, Jeffrey, Horner, Benjamin Constant,
Robert Emmet, and many a legal and local celebrity besides. By an
accident, variously explained, it has its rooms in the very bu