There came a very few years later the sentimental period, in which my unfinished novels assumed a more ambitious form, and were modelled chiefly upon Jane Eyre, with occasional tentative imitations of Thackeray.  Stories of gentle hearts that loved in vain, always ending in renunciation.  One romance there was, I well remember, begun with resolute purpose, after the first reading of Esmond, and in the endeavour to give life and local colour to a story of the Restoration period, a brilliantly wicked interval in the social history of England, which, after the lapse of thirty years, I am still as bent upon taking for the background of a love story as I was when I began “Master Anthony’s Record” in Esmondese, and made my girlish acquaintance with the Reading-room of the British Museum, where I went in quest of local colour, and where much kindness was shown to my youth and inexperience of the book world.  Poring over a folio edition of the State Trials at my uncle’s quiet rectory in sleepy Sandwich, I had discovered the passionate romantic story of Lord Grey’s elopement with his sister-in-law, next in sequence to the trial of Lawrence Braddon and Hugh Speke for conspiracy.  At the risk of seeming disloyal to my own race, I must add that it seemed to me a very tinpot order of plot to which these two learned gentlemen bent their legal minds, and which cost the Braddon family a heavy fine in land near Camelford—­confiscation which I have heard my father complain of as especially unfair—­Lawrence being a younger son.  The romantic story of Lord Grey was to be the subject of “Master Anthony’s Record,” but Master Anthony’s sentimental autobiography went the way of all my earlier efforts.  It was but a year or so after the collapse of Master Anthony, that a blindly-enterprising printer of Beverley, who had seen my poor little verses in the Beverley Recorder, made me the spirited offer of ten pounds for a serial story, to be set up and printed at Beverley, and published on commission by a London firm in Warwick Lane.  I cannot picture to myself, in my after-knowledge of the bookselling trade, any enterprise more futile in its inception or more feeble in its execution; but to my youthful ambition the actual commission to write a novel, with an advance payment of fifty shillings to show good faith on the part of my Yorkshire speculator, seemed like the opening of that pen-and-ink paradise which I had sighed for ever since I could hold a pen.  I had, previously to this date, found a Maecenas in Beverley, in the person of a learned gentleman who volunteered to foster my love of the Muses by buying the copyright of a volume of poems and publishing the same at his own expense—­which he did, poor man, without stint, and by which noble patronage of Poet’s Corner verse, he must have lost money.  He had, however, the privilege of dictating the subject of the principal poem, which was to sing—­however feebly—­Garibaldi’s Sicilian campaign.

[Illustration:  THE EVENING ROOM.]