, and that others were
unlovely to the ear; and at the same time he acquired a vocabulary
and a knowledge of grammar and punctuation that his earlier education
had failed to give him. He read new novels at his writing-table, and
took pleasure in correcting the mistakes of their authors in ink.
When he had done this, he would hand them to his wife, who always
read the end first, and, indeed, rarely pursued her investigation of
a book beyond the last chapter.

We buy knowledge with illusions, and pay a high price for it, for the
acquirement of quite a small degree of wisdom will deprive us of a
large number of pleasant fancies. So it was with the author, who
found his joy in novel-reading diminishing rapidly as his critical
knowledge increased. He was no longer able to lose himself between
the covers of a romance, but slid his paper-knife between the pages
of a book with an unwholesome readiness to be irritated by the
ignorance and folly of the novelist. His destructive criticism of
works of fiction became so acute that it was natural that his
unlettered friends should suggest that he himself ought to write a
novel. For a long while he was content to receive the flattering
suggestion with a reticent smile that masked his conviction that
there was a difference between criticism and creation. But as he grew
older the imperfections in the books he read ceased to give him the
thrill of the successful explorer in sight of the expected, and time
began to trickle too slowly through his idle fingers. One day he sat
down and wrote "Chapter I." at the head of a sheet of quarto paper.

It seemed to him that the difficulty was only one of selection, and
he wrote two-thirds of a novel with a breathless ease of creation
that made him marvel at himself and the pitiful struggles of less
gifted novelists. Then in a moment of insight he picked up his
manuscript and realised that what he had written was childishly
crude. He had felt his story while he wrote it, but somehow or other
he had failed to get his emotions on paper, and he saw quite clearly
that it was worse and not better than the majority of the books which
he had held up to ridicule.

There was a certain doggedness in his character that might have made
him a useful citizen but for that unfortunate hereditary spoon, and
he wrote "Chapter I." at the head of a new sheet of quarto paper long
before the library fire had reached the heart of his first luckless
manuscript. This tim