to hear the Bishop of Stepney again.

My own experience, especially as to "Red Pottage" and "Prisoners,"
struck me as so direful, I seemed so peculiarly outside the protection
of Providence, like the celebrated plot of ground on which "no rain nor
no dew never fell," that I consulted several other brother and sister
novelists as to how they had fared in this delicate matter. It is not
for me to reveal the interesting skeletons concealed in cupboards not my
own, but I have almost invariably returned from these interviews
cheered, chuckling, and consoled by the comfortable realisation that
others had writhed on a hotter gridiron than I.

Georges Sand, when she was accused of lampooning a certain _abbe_, said
that to draw one character of that kind one must know a thousand. She
has, I think, put her finger on the truth which is not easy to find--at
least, I never found it until I read those words of hers.

It is necessary to know a very large number of persons of a certain
kind before one can evolve a type. Each he or she contributes a twig,
and the author weaves them into a nest. I have no doubt that I must have
taken such a twig from nearly every clergyman I met who had a _soupcon_
of Mr. Gresley in him.

But if an author takes one tiny trait, one saying, one sentiment, direct
from a person, there is always the danger that the contributor will
recognise the theft, and, if of a self-regarding temperament, will
instantly conclude that the _whole_ character is drawn from himself.
There is, for instance, no more universal trait, of what has been
unkindly called "the old-maid temperament" in either sex, than the
assertion that it is always busy. But when such a trait is noted in a
book, how many sensitive readers assume that it is a cruel personality.
If people could but perceive that what they think to be character in
themselves is often only sex, or sexlessness; if they could but believe
in the universality of what they hold to be their individuality! And yet
how easily they believe in it when it is pleasant to do so, when they
write books about themselves, and thousands of grateful readers bombard
the gifted authoress with letters to tell her that they also have "felt
just like that," and have "been helped" by her exquisite sentiments,
which are the exact replicas of their own!

The worst of it is that with the academic or clerical prig, when the
mind has long been permitted to run in a deep, platitudinous groove from