really, somewhere in its secret economy, offended by that revelation of mechanical methods which made the autobiography either a disgusting or an amusing book to those who read it more intelligently.  A man with a watch before his eyes, penning exactly so many words every quarter of an hour—­one imagines that this picture might haunt disagreeably the thoughts even of Mudie’s steadiest subscriber, that it might come between him or her and any Trollopean work that lay upon the counter.

The surprise was so cynically sprung upon a yet innocent public.  At that happy time (already it seems so long ago) the literary news set before ordinary readers mostly had reference to literary work, in a reputable sense of the term, and not, as now, to the processes of “literary” manufacture and the ups and downs of the “literary” market.  Trollope himself tells how he surprised the editor of a periodical, who wanted a serial from him, by asking how many thousand words it should run to; an anecdote savouring indeed of good old days.  Since then, readers have grown accustomed to revelations of “literary” method, and nothing in that kind can shock them.  There has come into existence a school of journalism which would seem to have deliberately set itself the task of degrading authorship and everything connected with it; and these pernicious scribblers (or typists, to be more accurate) have found the authors of a fretful age only too receptive of their mercantile suggestions.  Yes, yes; I know as well as any man that reforms were needed in the relations between author and publisher.  Who knows better than I that your representative author face to face with your representative publisher was, is, and ever will be, at a ludicrous disadvantage?  And there is no reason in the nature and the decency of things why this wrong should not by some contrivance be remedied.  A big, blusterous, genial brute of a Trollope could very fairly hold his own, and exact at all events an acceptable share in the profits of his work.  A shrewd and vigorous man of business such as Dickens, aided by a lawyer who was his devoted friend, could do even better, and, in reaping sometimes more than his publisher, redress the ancient injustice.  But pray, what of Charlotte Bronte?  Think of that grey, pinched life, the latter years of which would have been so brightened had Charlotte Bronte received but, let us say, one third of what, in the same space of time, the publisher gained by her books.  I know all about this; alas! no man better.  None the less do I loathe and sicken at the manifold baseness, the vulgarity unutterable, which, as a result of the new order, is blighting our literary life.  It is not easy to see how, in such an atmosphere, great and noble books can ever again come into being.  May it, perhaps, be hoped that once again the multitude will be somehow touched with disgust?—­that the market for “literary” news of this costermonger sort will some day fail?