y, outspoken
writer was as good a judge of literary value, and as able to see any
beauties that the tragic dramas contained as nine-tenths, at any rate,
of ourselves. He had, moreover, the advantage of thoroughly
understanding the standpoint from which the tragedians expected their
work to be judged, and what was his conclusion? Briefly it was little
else than this, that they were a fraud or something very like it. For
my own part I cordially agree with him. I am free to confess that
with the exception perhaps of some of the Psalms of David I know no
writings which seem so little to deserve their reputation. I do not
know that I should particularly mind my sisters reading them, but I
will take good care never to read them myself."

This last bit about the Psalms was awful, and there was a great fight
with the editor as to whether or no it should be allowed to stand. Ernest
himself was frightened at it, but he had once heard someone say that the
Psalms were many of them very poor, and on looking at them more closely,
after he had been told this, he found that there could hardly be two
opinions on the subject. So he caught up the remark and reproduced it as
his own, concluding that these psalms had probably never been written by
David at all, but had got in among the others by mistake.

The essay, perhaps on account of the passage about the Psalms, created
quite a sensation, and on the whole was well received. Ernest's friends
praised it more highly than it deserved, and he was himself very proud of
it, but he dared not show it at Battersby. He knew also that he was now
at the end of his tether; this was his one idea (I feel sure he had
caught more than half of it from other people), and now he had not
another thing left to write about. He found himself cursed with a small
reputation which seemed to him much bigger than it was, and a
consciousness that he could never keep it up. Before many days were over
he felt his unfortunate essay to be a white elephant to him, which he
must feed by hurrying into all sorts of frantic attempts to cap his
triumph, and, as may be imagined, these attempts were failures.

He did not understand that if he waited and listened and observed,
another idea of some kind would probably occur to him some day, and that
the development of this would in its turn suggest still further ones. He
did not yet know that the very worst way of getting hold of idea