enough alive to its faults, and pretty modest
regarding its merits. It was not very good, he thought; but it was as
good as most books of the kind that had the run of circulating libraries
and the career of the season. He had critically examined more than one
fashionable novel by the authors of the day then popular, and he thought
that his intellect was as good as theirs and that he could write the
English language as well as those ladies or gentlemen; and as he now
ran over his early performance, he was pleased to find here and there
passages exhibiting both fancy and vigour, and traits, if not of genius,
of genuine passion and feeling. This, too, was Warrington's verdict,
when that severe critic, after half an hour's perusal of the manuscript,
and the consumption of a couple of pipes of tobacco, laid Pen's book
down, yawning portentously. "I can't read any more of that balderdash
now," he said; "but it seems to me there is some good stuff in it, Pen,
my boy. There's a certain greenness and freshness in it which I like
somehow. The bloom disappears off the face of poetry after you begin to
shave. You can't get up that naturalness and artless rosy tint in after
days. Your cheeks are pale, and have got faded by exposure to evening
parties, and you are obliged to take curling-irons, and macassar, and
the deuce-knows-what to your whiskers; they curl ambrosially, and you
are very grand and genteel, and so forth; but, ah! Pen, the spring-time
was the best."

"What the deuce have my whiskers to do with the subject in hand?" Pen
said (who, perhaps, may have been nettled by Warrington's allusion to
those ornaments, which, to say the truth, the young man coaxed, and
curled, and oiled, and perfumed, and petted, in rather an absurd
manner). "Do you think we can do anything with 'Walter Lorraine'? Shall
we take him to the publishers, or make an auto-da-fe of him?"

"I don't see what is the good of incremation," Warrington said, "though
I have a great mind to put him into the fire, to punish your atrocious
humbug and hypocrisy. Shall I burn him indeed? You have much too great a
value for him to hurt a hair of his head."

"Have I? Here goes," said Pen, and 'Walter Lorraine' went off the table,
and was flung on to the coals. But the fire having done its duty of
boiling the young man's breakfast-kettle, had given up work for the
day, and had gone out, as Pen knew very well; Warrington with a scornful
mile, once more took up the manus