effort!

Consider this passage. "Have you read Dickens? O! it is charming! Brave
Dickens! It has some of his very prettiest touches--those inimitable
Dickens touches which make such a great man of him, and the reading of
the book has done another author a great deal of good."

Thackeray is just as generous, and perhaps more critical, in writing of
Kingsley. "A fine, honest, go-a-head fellow, who charges a subject
heartily, impetuously, with the greatest courage and simplicity; but with
narrow eyes (his are extraordinarily brave, blue and honest), and with
little knowledge of the world, I think. But he is superior to us
worldlings in many ways, and I wish I had some of his honest pluck."

I have often wished that great authors, when their days of creation were
over, when "their minds grow grey and bald," would condescend to tell us
the history of their books. Sir Walter Scott did something of this kind
in the prefaces to the last edition of the Waverley Novels published
during his life. What can be more interesting than his account, in the
introduction to the "Fortunes of Nigel," of how he worked, how he
planned, and found all his plots and plans overridden by the demon at the
end of his pen! But Sir Walter was failing when he began those literary
confessions; good as they are, he came to them too late. Yet these are
not confessions which an author can make early. The pagan Aztecs only
confessed once in a lifetime--in old age, when they had fewer temptations
to fall to their old loves: then they made a clean breast of it once for
all. So it might be with an author. While he is in his creative vigour,
we want to hear about his fancied persons, about Pendennis, Beatrix,
Becky, not about himself, and how he invented them. But when he has
passed his best, then it is he who becomes of interest; it is about
himself that we wish him to speak, as far as he modestly may. Who would
not give "Lovel the Widower" and "Philip" for some autobiographical and
literary prefaces to the older novels? They need not have been more
egotistic than the "Roundabout Papers." They would have had far more
charm. Some things cannot be confessed. We do not ask who was the
original Sir Pitt Crawley, or the original Blanche Amory. But we might
learn in what mood, in what circumstances the author wrote this passage
or that.

The Letters contain a few notes of this kind, a few literary confessions.
We hear that Emmy Sedley was part