might be an ass: he had room in his life
for his ears. Ray had a burden that demanded a back: the back must
therefore now be properly instituted. As to the editorship, it was
simply heaven-sent, being not at all another case of _The Blackport
Beacon_ but a case of the very opposite. The proprietor, the great Mr.
Bousefield, had approached him precisely because his name, which was to
be on the cover, _didn't_ represent the chatty. The whole thing was
to be--oh, on fiddling little lines of course--a protest against
the chatty. Bousefield wanted him to be himself; it was for himself
Bousefield had picked him out. Wasn't it beautiful and brave of
Bousefield? He wanted literature, he saw the great reaction coming,
the way the cat was going to jump. "Where will you get literature?" I
wofully asked; to which he replied with a laugh that what he had to get
was not literature but only what Bousefield would take for it.

In that single phrase without more ado I discovered his famous remedy.
What was before him for the future was not to do his work but to do what
somebody else would take for it. I had the question out with him on the
next opportunity, and of all the lively discussions into which we had
been destined to drift it lingers in my mind as the liveliest. This
was not, I hasten to add, because I disputed his conclusions: it was an
effect of the very force with which, when I had fathomed his wretched
premises, I took them to my soul. It was very well to talk with Jane
Highmore about his standing alone: the eminent relief of this position
had brought him to the verge of ruin. Several persons admired his
books--nothing was less contestable; but they appeared to have a mortal
objection to acquiring them by subscription or by purchase: they begged
or borrowed or stole, they delegated one of the party perhaps to
commit the volumes to memory and repeat them, like the bards of old, to
listening multitudes. Some ingenious theory was required at any rate to
account for the inexorable limits of his circulation. It wasn't a thing
for five people to live on; therefore either the objects circulated must
change their nature or the organisms to be nourished must. The former
change was perhaps the easier to consider first. Limbert considered
it with extraordinary ingenuity from that time on, and the ingenuity,
greater even than any I had yet had occasion to admire in him, made the
whole next stage of his career rich in curiosity and suspen