and are still perceptibly advancing, the wider and keener
appreciation of the writings themselves. In its gyrations the ball then
rolling at the Beader's foot imparted a momentum to one far nobler
and more lasting--that of the Novelist's reputation, one that in its
movement gives no sign of slackening--"labitur et labetur in omne
volubilis sevum."

[Illustration: reading-page.jpg]

The long continuance of the remarkable success attendant upon the
Readings all through, is only to be explained by the extraordinary care
and earnestness the Reader lavished continuously upon his task when
once it had been undertaken. In this he was only in another phase of his
career, consistently true to the one simple rule adopted by him as an
artist throughout. What that rule was anyone might see at a glance on
turning over the leaves of one of his books, it matters not which, in
the original manuscript. There, the countless alterations, erasures,
interpolations, transpositions, interlineations, shew plainly enough the
minute and conscientious thought devoted to the perfecting, so far as
might be in any way possible, of the work of composition. What reads so
unaffectedly and so felicitously, it is then seen, is but the result of
exquisite consideration. It is Sheridan's whimsical line which declares
that,--

"Easy writing's cursed hard reading."

And it is Pope who summarizes the method by which not "easy writing"
but "ease in writing" is arrived at, where it is said of those who have
acquired a mastery of the craft,--

"They polish all with so much life and ease, You think 'tis nature and
a knack to please: But ease in writing flows from art, not chance; As
those move easiest who have learn'd to dance."

Precisely the same elaboration of care, which all through his career was
dedicated by Charles Dickens to the most delightful labour of his life,
that of writing, was accorded by him to the lesser but still eminently
intellectual toil of preparing his Readings for representation. It was
not by any means that, having written a story years previously, he had,
in his new capacity as a reciter, merely to select two or three chapters
from it, and read them off with an air of animation. Virtually, the
fragmentary portions thus taken from his larger works were re-written
by him, with countless elisions and eliminations after having been
selected. Reprinted in their new shape, each as "A Reading," they were
then touched and retouched