ces for his novels and was not well paid for his consular services, it
is not easy to see how he managed to make ends meet.

How He Wrote.

Nor is it easy to see how he contrived to produce his novels. He was too
passionately addicted to society and the enjoyment of life to spare an
instant from them if he could help it; and the wonder is not that he
should have written so well but that he should have written at all.
Fortunately or the other thing, his books cost him no effort. He wrote
or dictated at a gallop and, his copy once produced, had finished his
work. He abhorred revision, and while keenly sensitive to blame and
greedy of praise he ceased to care for his books as soon as they had left
his desk. That he was not in scarce any sense an artist is but too
clear. He never worked on a definite plan nor was at any pains to
contrive a plot; he depended on the morning's impressions for the
evening's task, and wrote _Con Cregan_ under the immediate influence of a
travelled Austrian, who used to talk to him every night ere he sat down
to his story. But he was a wonderful improvisatore. He had
imagination--(even romantic imagination: as the episode of Menelaus Crick
in _Con Cregan_ will show)--a keen, sure eye for character, incomparable
facility in composition, an inexhaustible fund of shrewdness,
whimsicality, high spirits, an admirable knack of dialogue; and as consul
at Spezzia and at Trieste, as a fashionable practitioner at Brussels, as
dispensary doctor on the wild Ulster coast, he was excellently placed for
the kind of literature it was in him to produce. Writing at random and
always under the spur of necessity, he managed to inform his work with
extraordinary vitality and charm. His books were only made to sell, but
it is like enough that they will also live, for they are yet well nigh as
readable as at first, and Nina and Kate O'Donoghue--(for instance)--seem
destined to go down to posterity as typical and representative. Had
their author taken art seriously, and devoted all his energy to its
practice, he could scarce have done more than this. Perhaps, indeed, he
would not have done so much. It could never have been Lorrequer's to
'build the lofty rhyme.' It was an honest as well as a brilliant
creature; and I believe we should all have suffered if some avenging
chance had borne it in upon him that to be really lofty your rhyme must
of necessity be not blown upwards like a bubble but built in a