d of literature;
the agony of the maker, his despair and sickness, were as accursed as the
pains of labor. He was ready to read and admire the work of the great
Smith, but he did not wish to hear of the period when the great Smith had
writhed and twisted like a scotched worm, only hoping to be put out of
his misery, to go mad or die, to escape somehow from the bitter pains.
And Lucian knew no one else. Now and then he read in the paper the fame
of the great _litterateurs_; the Gypsies were entertaining the Prince of
Wales, the Jolly Beggars were dining with the Lord Mayor, the Old Mumpers
were mingling amicably and gorgeously with the leading members of the
Stock Exchange. He was so unfortunate as to know none of these gentlemen,
but it hardly seemed likely that they could have done much for him in any
case. Indeed, in his heart, he was certain that help and comfort from
without were in the nature of things utterly impossible, his ruin and
grief were within, and only his own assistance could avail. He tried to
reassure himself, to believe that his torments were a proof of his
vocation, that the facility of the novelist who stood six years deep in
contracts to produce romances was a thing wholly undesirable, but all the
while he longed for but a drop of that inexhaustible fluency which he
professed to despise.

He drove himself out from that dreary contemplation of the white paper
and the idle pen. He went into the frozen and deserted streets, hoping
that he might pluck the burning coal from his heart, but the fire was
not quenched. As he walked furiously along the grim iron roads he fancied
that those persons who passed him cheerfully on their way to friends and
friendly hearths shrank from him into the mists as they went by. Lucian
imagined that the fire of his torment and anguish must in some way glow
visibly about him; he moved, perhaps, in a nimbus that proclaimed the
blackness and the flames within. He knew, of course, that in misery he
had grown delirious, that the well-coated, smooth-hatted personages who
loomed out of the fog upon him were in reality shuddering only with
cold, but in spite of common sense he still conceived that he saw on
their faces an evident horror and disgust, and something of the
repugnance that one feels at the sight of a venomous snake, half-killed,
trailing its bleeding vileness out of sight. By design Lucian tried to
make for remote and desolate places, and yet when he had succeeded in