apportion out
and dovetail his incidents, dialogues, characters, and descriptive
morsels so as to fit them all exactly into 930 pages, without either
compressing them unnaturally, or extending them artificially at the
end of his labour? Do I not myself know that I am at this moment in
want of a dozen pages, and that I am sick with cudgelling my brains
to find them? And then, when everything is done, the kindest-hearted
critic of them all invariably twits us with the incompetency and
lameness of our conclusion. We have either become idle and neglected
it, or tedious and overlaboured it. It is insipid or unnatural,
overstrained or imbecile. It means nothing, or attempts too much. The
last scene of all, as all last scenes we fear must be,

Is second childishness, and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

I can only say that if some critic who thoroughly knows his work, and
has laboured on it till experience has made him perfect, will write
the last fifty pages of a novel in the way they should be written, I,
for one, will in future do my best to copy the example. Guided by my
own lights only, I confess that I despair of success.

For the last week or ten days Mr. Slope had seen nothing of Mrs.
Proudie, and very little of the bishop. He still lived in the palace,
and still went through his usual routine work; but the confidential
doings of the diocese had passed into other hands. He had seen this
clearly and marked it well, but it had not much disturbed him. He
had indulged in other hopes till the bishop's affairs had become dull
to him, and he was moreover aware that, as regarded the diocese, Mrs.
Proudie had checkmated him. It has been explained, in the beginning
of these pages, how three or four were contending together as to
who, in fact, should be Bishop of Barchester. Each of these had now
admitted to himself (or boasted to herself) that Mrs. Proudie was
victorious in the struggle. They had gone through a competitive
examination of considerable severity, and she had come forth the
winner, _facile princeps_. Mr. Slope had for a moment run her hard,
but it was only for a moment. It had become, as it were, acknowledged
that Hiram's Hospital should be the testing-point between them, and
now Mr. Quiverful was already in the hospital, the proof of Mrs.
Proudie's skill and courage.

All this did not break down Mr. Slope's spirit, because he had other
hopes. But, alas, at last ther