to get on; why don't they bestir
themselves, push and bustle, welcome kicks so long as halfpence follow,
make place in the world's eye--in short, take a leaf from the book of Mr
Jasper Milvain?

But try to imagine a personality wholly unfitted for the rough and
tumble of the world's labour-market. From the familiar point of view
these men were worthless; view them in possible relation to a humane
order of Society, and they are admirable citizens. Nothing is easier
than to condemn a type of character which is unequal to the coarse
demands of life as it suits the average man. These two were richly
endowed with the kindly and the imaginative virtues; if fate threw them
amid incongruous circumstances, is their endowment of less value? You
scorn their passivity; but it was their nature and their merit to be
passive.

Gifted with independent means, each of them would have taken quite
a different aspect in your eyes. The sum of their faults was their
inability to earn money; but, indeed, that inability does not call for
unmingled disdain.

It was very weak of Harold Biffen to come so near perishing of hunger as
he did in the days when he was completing his novel. But he would have
vastly preferred to eat and be satisfied had any method of obtaining
food presented itself to him. He did not starve for the pleasure of the
thing, I assure you. Pupils were difficult to get just now, and writing
that he had sent to magazines had returned upon his hands. He pawned
such of his possessions as he could spare, and he reduced his meals to
the minimum. Nor was he uncheerful in his cold garret and with his empty
stomach, for 'Mr Bailey, Grocer,' drew steadily to an end.

He worked very slowly. The book would make perhaps two volumes of
ordinary novel size, but he had laboured over it for many months,
patiently, affectionately, scrupulously. Each sentence was as good as
he could make it, harmonious to the ear, with words of precious meaning
skilfully set. Before sitting down to a chapter he planned it minutely
in his mind; then he wrote a rough draft of it; then he elaborated the
thing phrase by phrase. He had no thought of whether such toil would be
recompensed in coin of the realm; nay, it was his conviction that, if
with difficulty published, it could scarcely bring him money. The work
must be significant, that was all he cared for. And he had no society of
admiring friends to encourage him. Reardon understood the merit of the
workm