elayed its appearance.
Maltravers knew nothing of its publication; he had meant, after his
return to town, to have sent to forbid its appearance; but his thoughts
of late had crushed everything else out of his memory--he had forgotten
its existence. And now, in all the pomp and parade of authorship, it was
sent into the world! _Now_, _now_, when it was like an indecent mockery
of the Bed of Death--a sacrilege, an impiety! There is a terrible
disconnection between the author and the man---the author's life and
the man's life--the eras of visible triumph may be those of the most
intolerable, though unrevealed and unconjectured anguish. The book that
delighted us to compose may first appear in the hour when all things
under the sun are joyless. This had been Ernest Maltravers's most
favoured work. It had been conceived in a happy hour of great
ambition--it had been executed with that desire of truth, which, in the
mind of genius, becomes ART. How little in the solitary hours stolen
from sleep had he thought of self, and that labourer's hire called
"fame!" how had he dreamt that he was promulgating secrets to make his
kind better, and wiser, and truer to the great aims of life! How had
Florence, and Florence alone, understood the beatings of his heart in
every page! _And now_!--it so chanced that the work was reviewed in the
paper he read--it was not only a hostile criticism, it was a personally
abusive diatribe, a virulent invective. All the motives that can darken
or defile were ascribed to him. All the mean spite of some mean mind
was sputtered forth. Had the writer known the awful blow that awaited
Maltravers at that time, it is not in man's nature but that he would
have shrunk from this petty gall upon the wrung withers; but, as I have
said, there is a terrible disconnection between the author and the man.
The first is always at our mercy--of the last we know nothing. At such
an hour Maltravers could feel none of the contempt that proud--none of
the wrath that vain, minds feel at these stings. He could feel nothing
but an undefined abhorrence of the world, and of the aims and objects
he had pursued so long. Yet that even he did not then feel. He was in
a dream; but as men remember dreams, so when he awoke did he loathe his
own former aspirations, and sicken at their base rewards. It was the
first time since his first year of inexperienced authorship that abuse
had had the power even to vex him for a moment. But here, whe