contributor to sundry of those ephemeral undergraduate
periodicals which, in their short life, are so universally reviled and
so eagerly read.

Mark's productions, imitative and crude as they necessarily were, had
admirers who strengthened his own conviction that literature was his
destiny; the tripos faded into the background, replaced by the more
splendid vision of seeing an accepted article from his pen in a real
London magazine; he gave frantic chase to the will o' the wisp of
literary fame, which so many pursue all their lives in vain, fortunate
if it comes at last to flicker for awhile over their graves.

With Mark the results were what might have been expected: his papers
in his second year examinations were so bad that he received a solemn
warning that his scholarship was in some danger, though he was not
actually deprived of it, and finally, instead of the good class his
tutor had once expected, he took a low third, and left Cambridge in
almost as bad a plight as Arthur Pendennis.

Now he had found himself forced to accept a third-form mastership in
his old school, where it seemed that, if he was no longer a disciple,
he was scarcely a prophet.

But all this had only fanned his ambition. He would show the world
there was something in him still; and he began to send up articles to
various London magazines, and to keep them going like a juggler's
oranges, until his productions obtained a fair circulation, in
manuscript.

Now and then a paper of his did gain the honours of publication, so
that his disease did not die out, as happens with some. He went on,
writing whatever came into his head, and putting his ideas out in
every variety of literary mould--from a blank-verse tragedy to a
sonnet, and a three-volume novel to a society paragraph--with equal
ardour and facility, and very little success.

For he believed in himself implicitly. At present he was still before
the outwork of prejudice which must be stormed by every conscript in
the army of literature: that he would carry it eventually he did not
doubt. But this disappointment about, the committee hit him hard for a
moment; it seemed like a forecast of a greater disaster. Mark,
however, was of a sanguine temperament, and it did not take him long
to remount his own pedestal. 'After all,' he thought, 'what does it
matter? If my "Sweet Bells Jangled" is only taken, I shan't care
about anything else. And there is some of my best work in that, too.
I'll go