came forth with a fresh name, while the knowing old impostor chuckled in his garret and pouched his pittance.  I believe the funny soul has passed away; but really there are many very pretentious persons who do little more than vary his methods unconsciously.  Poor James Grant delighted many a schoolboy, and perhaps his best work was never quite so much appreciated as it ought to have been.  “The Black Dragoons,” “The Queen’s Own,” and “The Romance of War” all contained good work, and many gallant lads delighted their hearts with them; I know that one youth at least learned “The Black Dragoons” by heart, and amused the people in a lonely farm-house by reciting whole chapters on winter nights, and I have some reason to believe that the book gave the boy a taste for literature which ended in his becoming a novelist.  But, as Grant went on with machine-like regularity, how curiously similar to each other his books became!  Narvaez Cifuentes, in “The Romance of War,” is the type of all the villains; the young dragoons were all alike; the wooden heroines might have been chopped out by a literary carpenter from one model; the charges, the escapes, the perils of the hero never varied very much from volume to volume; and the fact was obvious that the brain had ceased to develop any strikingly original ideas and only the busy hand worked on.  A very sarcastic personage once observed that “it is better for literary men to read a little occasionally.”  To outsiders the advice may seem like a piece of grotesque fun; but those who know much of literary work are well aware that a writer may very easily become possessed by a sick disgust of books which never leaves him.  He will look at volumes of extracts, he will skim poetry, he will read eagerly for a few days or weeks in order to get up a subject; but the pure delight in literature for its own sake has left him, and he is as decidedly prosaic a tradesman as his own hosier.  Such a man soon joins the written-out division, and, unless he travels much or has a keenly humorous eye for the things about him, he runs a very good chance of becoming an intolerable bore.  He forgets that the substance of his brain is constantly fading, and that he needs not only to replenish the physical substance of the organ by constant care, but to replenish all his dwindling stores of knowledge, ideas, and even of verbal resources.  Among the older authors there were some who offered melancholy spectacles of mental exhaustion; and the practised reader knows how to look for particular features in their work, just as he looks for Wouvermans’ white horse and Beaumont’s brown tree.  These literary spinners forget the example of Macaulay, who was quite contented if he turned out two foolscap pages as his actual completed task in mere writing for one day.  He was never tired of laying in new stores, and he persistently refreshed his memory by running over books which he had read oftentimes before.  The books and manuscripts which Gibbon read in twenty