with a walking-stick, and were, we said boldly and openly, Harolds and Hectors slaying our thousands.  Now of course we are grown up to self-respect, and must needs be a little disingenuous about it.  But as the story unfolds there is no mistaking the likeness, in spite of the transfiguration.  This bold, decided man who performs such deeds of derring-do in the noisome slum, knocks down the burly wife-beater, rescues an unmistakable Miss Clapton from the knife of a Lascar, and is all the while cultivating a virtuous consumption that stretches him on an edifying, pathetic, and altogether beautiful deathbed in the last chapter——­My dear Authorling, cry my friends, we hear the squeak of that little voice of yours in every word he utters.  Is that what you aspire to be, that twopence-coloured edition of yourself?  Heaven defend you from your desires!

Yet there was a singular fascination in writing the book; to be in anticipation my own sympathetic historian, to joy with my joys yet to come, and sorrow with my sorrows, to bear disaster like a man, and at last to close my own dear eyes, and with a swelling heart write my own epitaph.  The pleasure remained with me until I reached the end.  How admirably I strutted in front of myself!  And I and the better self of me that was flourishing about in the book—­we pretended not to know each other for what we were.  He was myself with a wig and a sham visiting card, and I owed it to myself to respect my disguise.  I made him with very red hair—­my hair is fairly dark—­and shifted his university from London to Cambridge.  Clearly it could not be the same person, I argued.  But I endowed him with all the treasures of myself; I made him say all the good things I might have said had I thought of them opportunely, and all the noble thoughts that occurred to me afterwards occurred to him at the time.  He was myself—­myself at a premium, myself without any drawbacks, the quintessence and culmination of me.  And yet somehow when he came back from the typewriter he seemed a bit of an ass.

Probably every tadpole author writes a pose novel—­at least I hope so for the sake of my self-respect.  Most, after my fashion, burn the thing, or benevolent publishers lose it.  It is an ill thing if by some accident the tadpole tale survives the tadpole stage.  The authoress does the feminine equivalent, but I should judge either that she did it more abundantly or else that she burned less.  Has she never swept past you with a scornful look, disdained you in all the pride of her beauty, rippled laughter at you, or amazed you with her artless girlishness?  And even after the early stages some of the trick may survive, unless I read books with malice instead of charity.  I must confess, though, that I have a weakness for finding mine author among his puppets.  I conceive him always taking the best parts, like an actor-manager or a little boy playing with his sisters.  I do not read many novels with sincere belief, and I like