udery, have not refused to
learn it or have not carelessly forgotten the learning. Even Scott
committed the fault sometimes, though never in his very best work.
Dumas--when he went out and left the "young men" to fill in, and stayed
too long, and made them fill in too much--did it constantly. Yet again,
that mixture of excess and defect in talking, which has been noted
already, becomes more and more trying in connection with the previously
mentioned faults and others. Of _mere_ talk there is enough and
immensely to spare; but it is practically never real dialogue, still
less real conversation. It is harangue, narrative, soliloquy, what you
will, in the less lively theatrical forms of speech watered out in
prose, with "passing of compliments" in the most gentlefolkly manner,
and a spice of "Phebus" or Euphuism now and then. But it is never real
personal talk,[160] while as for conveying the action _by_ the talk as
the two great masters above mentioned and nearly all others of their
kind do, there is no vestige of even an attempt at the feat, or a
glimpse of its desirableness.

Again, one sees before long that of one priceless quality--a sense of
humour--we shall find, though there is a little mild wit, especially in
the words of the ladies named in the note, no trace in the book, but a
"terrible _minus_ quantity." I do not know that the late Sir William
Gilbert was a great student of literature--of classical literature, to
judge from the nomenclature of _Pygmalion and Galatea_ mentioned above,
he certainly was not. But his eyes would surely have glistened at the
unconscious and serious anticipation of his own methods at their most
Gilbertian, had he ever read pp. 308 _sqq._ of this first volume. Here
not only do Cyrus and a famous pirate, by boarding with irresistible
valour on each side, "exchange ships," and so find themselves at once to
have gained the enemy's and lost their own, but this remarkable
manoeuvre is repeated more than twenty times without advantage on
either side--or without apparently any sensible losses on either side.
From which it would appear that both contented themselves with displays
of agility in climbing from vessel to vessel, and did nothing so
impolite as to use their "javelins, arrows, and cutlasses" (of which,
nevertheless, we hear) against the persons of their competitors in such
agility on the other side. It did come to an end somehow after some
time; but one is quite certain that if Mr. C