The “New Sun” was my book.  I put on my hat and walked straightway up to the hole in the rock, about a mile round the corner, where the expressman always leaves my parcels, and took up the package to bring home.  It was very heavy.  I balanced it first on one arm and then on the other, until, as the poet has it,—­

    “Both were nigh to breaking.”

Then I lifted it by the cords, but they cut my fingers.  Then I remembered the natural law, that internal atmospheric pressure prevents any consciousness of the enormous external pressure exerted by an atmosphere forty-five miles thick, and applied the law, saying, “These books have all been upon the inside of my head, of course I shall not feel them on the outside.”  So I put the package on my head, and walked on, making believe I was in a gymnasium, keeping a sharp watch fore and aft, and considering the distant rumbling of wheels a signal for lowering my colors.  In my country people do not carry their burdens on their heads, nor would they be likely to account for me on the principles of Natural Philosophy.  I might have been apprehended as a lunatic, but for my timely caution.  Thus the “New Suns” came home and were speedily divested of their dun wrappings.  I lingered over them, admiring their clear type, their fragrance, their crispness.  I opened them wide, because they would open so frankly.  I delighted myself with their fair, fine smoothness.  And then I began to read.  I am ashamed to say I never read a more interesting book!

How very true it is that suffering is about equally distributed, after all!  If you don’t have your troubles spread out, you have them in a lump.  The furies may seem to be held in abeyance, but they will only lay on their lashes all the harder when they do come.  My unnatural calmness was succeeded by a storm of consternation.  I pass over the few days that followed.  If you ever put yourself into a pillory in the night just to see how it seemed, and then found yourself fastened there in good earnest, and day dawning, and all the marketmen and shopkeepers up and stirring, and everybody coming by in a few minutes, you will not need to ask how I felt.  When you write a book, you are quite alone and your pen is entirely private; but when it comes to you so unquestionably printed, and inexorable, and out-of-doors—­Ah, me!  It did not seem like a book at all,—­not at all the abstraction and impersonality that were intended, but my proper self bevelled and (with another syllable inserted) walking out into the world with malice aforethought.

But though a writer is before critics, did it never occur to you that the critics are just as much before the writers?  A critic’s talk about a book is just as truly a revelation of the critic as the writer’s talk in the book is a revelation of the writer.  One man gives you an opinion that implies attention.  He does not go into the depths of the matter, but he tells you honestly what he likes