g, were it only to a single reader. He will be
unfortunate, indeed, if he suit no one. He has the chance, besides, to
stumble on something that a dull person shall be able to comprehend; and
for a dull person to have read anything and, for that once, comprehended
it, makes a marking epoch in his education.

Here then is work worth doing and worth trying to do well. And so, if I
were minded to welcome any great accession to our trade, it should not
be from any reason of a higher wage, but because it was a trade which
was useful in a very great and in a very high degree; which every honest
tradesman could make more serviceable to mankind in his single
strength; which was difficult to do well and possible to do better every
year; which called for scrupulous thought on the part of all who
practised it, and hence became a perpetual education to their nobler
natures; and which, pay it as you please, in the large majority of the
best cases will still be underpaid. For surely, at this time of day in
the nineteenth century, there is nothing that an honest man should fear
more timorously than getting and spending more than he deserves.

FOOTNOTES:

[27] Mr. James Payn.

[28] A footnote, at least, is due to the admirable example set before
all young writers in the width of literary sympathy displayed by Mr.
Swinburne. He runs forth to welcome merit, whether in Dickens or
Trollope, whether in Villon, Milton, or Pope. This is, in criticism,
the attitude we should all seek to preserve, not only in that, but
in every branch of literary work.

V

BOOKS WHICH HAVE INFLUENCED ME

The Editor[29] has somewhat insidiously laid a trap for his
correspondents, the question put appearing at first so innocent, truly
cutting so deep. It is not, indeed, until after some reconnaissance and
review that the writer awakes to find himself engaged upon something in
the nature of autobiography, or, perhaps worse, upon a chapter in the
life of that little, beautiful brother whom we once all had, and whom we
have all lost and mourned, the man we ought to have been, the man we
hoped to be. But when word has been passed (even to an editor), it
should, if possible, be kept; and if sometimes I am wise and say too
little, and sometimes weak and say too much, the blame must lie at the
door of the person who entrapped me.

The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works
of fiction. They do not p