was pretty obvious, he thought, that the stuff was poor and beneath the standard of publication.  The book had taken a year and a half in the making; it was a pious attempt to translate into English prose the form and mystery of the domed hills, the magic of occult valleys, the sound of the red swollen brook swirling through leafless woods.  Day-dreams and toil at nights had gone into the eager pages, he had labored hard to do his very best, writing and rewriting, weighing his cadences, beginning over and over again, grudging no patience, no trouble if only it might be pretty good; good enough to print and sell to a reading public which had become critical.  He glanced through the manuscript in his hand, and to his astonishment, he could not help thinking that in its measure it was decent work.  After three months his prose seemed fresh and strange as if it had been wrought by another man, and in spite of himself he found charming things, and impressions that were not commonplace.  He knew how weak it all was compared with his own conceptions; he had seen an enchanted city, awful, glorious, with flame smitten about its battlements, like the cities of the Sangraal, and he had molded his copy in such poor clay as came to his hand; yet, in spite of the gulf that yawned between the idea and the work, he knew as he read that the thing accomplished was very far from a failure.  He put back the leaves carefully, and glanced again at Messrs Beit’s list.  It had escaped his notice that A Bad Un to Beat was in its third three-volume edition.  It was a great thing, at all events, to know in what direction to aim, if he wished to succeed.  If he worked hard, he thought, he might some day win the approval of the coy and retiring Miranda of Smart Society; that modest maiden might in his praise interrupt her task of disinterested advertisement, her philanthropic counsels to “go to Jumper’s, and mind you ask for Mr. C. Jumper, who will show you the lovely blue paper with the yellow spots at ten shillings the piece.”  He put down the pamphlet, and laughed again at the books and the reviewers:  so that he might not weep.  This then was English fiction, this was English criticism, and farce, after all, was but an ill-played tragedy.

The rejected manuscript was hidden away, and his father quoted Horace’s maxim as to the benefit of keeping literary works for some time “in the wood.”  There was nothing to grumble at, though Lucian was inclined to think the duration of the reader’s catarrh a little exaggerated.  But this was a trifle; he did not arrogate to himself the position of a small commercial traveler, who expects prompt civility as a matter of course, and not at all as a favor.  He simply forgot his old book, and resolved that he would make a better one if he could.  With the hot fit of resolution, the determination not to be snuffed out by one refusal upon him, he began to beat about in his mind for some new scheme.  At first it seemed that he had hit upon a promising subject;