ast.' Miss Porter is remembered by her 'Scottish
Chiefs'--scarcely at all, perhaps, by her 'Thaddeus of Warsaw.'
Everybody knows how strongly 'The Monk' took the fancy of the reading
world--so strongly that the writer was 'Monk' Lewis, and 'Monk' Lewis
only, ever after. Mackenzie's 'Man of Feeling' survives, but the 'Man of
the World' and 'Julia Roubigne' are as if they had never existed. And
look at the playwrights! 'She Stoops to Conquer' is a classic, but 'The
Good-Natured Man' is not even good-naturedly tolerated. 'The Road to
Ruin' has eclipsed 'Duplicity' and 'The Deserted Daughter.' We all know
'The Honeymoon,' but who has seen, how many have read, 'The Curfew' and
'The School for Authors'? We flock to 'Wild Oats,' but alas for 'The
Agreeable Surprise'! 'The Man of the World' keeps Macklin's name before
us, but we have said good-bye to 'Love a la Mode.'

In truth, it is not a bad thing thus to be associated with one definite,
unmistakable success. Gerard Hamilton did more for himself by that
single brilliant speech than if he had delivered a whole multitude of
less striking orations. There is nothing more fatal to a man than
middlingness--a sort of dead level of mediocre performance. The world
loses count of merely respectable outcome. To obtain its regard you must
take its imagination captive at least once. You may be a very excellent
person, and do very useful work; but, if you desire to be kept in mind,
you must achieve something to which your name can be popularly attached.
It is thus that Beattie and 'The Minstrel,' Green and 'The Spleen,'
Somerville and 'The Chase,' Blair and 'The Grave,' Falconer and 'The
Shipwreck,' Pollok and 'The Course of Time'--to name no others--are
inseparably associated the one with the other. The works in question,
probably, are rarely opened, but their titles at any rate have stuck in
the general memory. Even in our own time, for the great majority of
people, Miss Braddon will always be the author of 'Lady Audley's
Secret,' Mrs. Oliphant always the author of 'The Chronicles of
Carlingford,' Mrs. Henry Wood always the author of 'East Lynne'--and so
on. That is the way in which they are remembered.

Generally speaking, versatility is undesirable when reputation is the
object aimed at. The world has not a very good memory, or, rather, it
has so much to think about that it desires not to be more encumbered
than it can help. Such men as the late Lord Lytton, for example, are, in
one