You may possibly do as an English novelist of the privileged sex
is said to have done, and write novels while people are calling on you
and you are talking to them (though I should myself consider it bad
manners, and the novels would certainly bear traces of the exploit). But
you can hardly do it while, as a famous caricature represents the scene,
persons of that same sex, in various dress or undress, are frolicking
about your chair and bestowing on you their obliging caresses. Nor are
corricolos and speronares, though they may be good things to write on in
one sense, good in another to write in.

[314] As far as I know Maquet, his line seems to me to have been drama
rather than fiction.

[315] I seem to remember somebody (I rather think it was Henley, and it
was very likely to be) attempting a defence of this. But, except _pour
rire_, such a thing is hopeless.

[316] I think (but it is a long time since I read the book) that it is
the heroine of this who, supposed to be a dead, escapes from "that
grewsome thing, premature interment" (as Sandy Mackay justly calls it),
because of the remarkable odour of _violettes de Parme_ which her
unspotted flesh evolves from the actual grave.

[317] I do not mind Montalais, but I object to Malicozne both in himself
and as her lover. Mlle. de la Valliere and the plots against her virtue
give us "pious Selinda" at unconscionable length, and, but that it would
have annoyed Athos, I rather wish M. le Vicomte de la Bragelonne himself
had come to an end sooner.

[318] My friend Mr. Henley, I believe, ranked it very high, and so did a
common friend of his and mine, the late universally regretted Mr. George
Wyndham. It so happened that, by accident, I never read the book till a
few years ago; and Mr. Wyndham saw it, fresh from the bookseller's and
uncut (or technically, "unopened") in my study. I told him the
circumstances, and he said, in his enthusiastic way, "I _do_ envy you!"

[319] I do not need to be reminded of the conditions of health that also
affected _Peveril_.

[320] I need not repeat, but merely refer to, what I have said of
_Cinq-Mars_ and of _Notre-Dame de Paris_.

[321] On the very day on which I was going over the rough draft of this
passage I saw, in a newspaper of repute, some words which perhaps throw
light on the objection to Dumas as having no literary merit. In them
"incident, coherence, humour, and dramatic power" were all excluded from
this merit, "style" al