his
dreamy brain, and he retailed them all to his pupils, among whom I was
certainly the only one who took them in and seriously thought them over.
Yet I cannot say that I _really_ liked the man himself. He was not to me
exactly sympathetic-human. Such training as his would develop in any boy
certain weaknesses--and I had mine--which were very repulsive to my
father, who carried plain common-sense to extremes, and sometimes into
its opposite of unconscious eccentricity, though there was no word which
he so much hated.

Bulwer's "Last Days of Pompeii," "The Disowned," and "Pilgrims of the
Rhine" made a deep and lasting impression on me. I little thought then
that I should in after years be the guest of the author in his home, and
see the skull of Arbaces. Oh, that by some magic power every author
could be made to feel _all_ the influence, all the charm, which his art
exerts on his readers, and especially the young. Sometimes, now and
then, by golden chance, a writer of books does realise this, and then
feels that he has lived to some purpose. Once it happened to me to find
a man, an owner of palaces and millions, who had every facility for
becoming familiar with far greater minds and books than mine, who had for
years collected with care and read everything which I had ever written.
He actually knew more about my books than I did. I was startled at the
discovery as at a miracle. And if the reader knew _what_ a _melange_ I
have written, he would not wonder at it.

It is very probable that no man living appreciates the vast degree to
which any book whatever which aims at a little more than merely
entertaining, and appeals at all to thought, influences the world, and
how many readers it gets. There are books, of which a thousand copies
were never sold, which have permeated society and been the argument of
national revolutions. Such a book was the "Political Economy" of H. C.
Carey, of which I possess the very last copy of the first, and I believe
the only, edition. And there are novels which have gone to the three
hundred thousand, of whose authors it may be said that

"Over the barren desert of their brains
There never strayed the starved camel of an idea,"

and whose works vanish like wind.

What is very remarkable is the manner in which even the great majority of
readers confuse these two classes, and believe that mere popular success
is correlative with genius and desert. A great cause of this re