to get such entertainment from them as I can.  So that these artless little self-revelations are very sweet and precious to me among all the lay figures, tragedy and comedy.  Since the deception is transparent I make the most of the transparency, and love to see the clumsy fingers on the strings of the marionettes.  And this will be none the less pleasant now that I have so narrowly escaped giving this entertainment to others.

I suppose this stage is a necessary one.  We begin with ignorance and the imagination, the material of the pose novel.  Later come self-knowledge, disappointments and self-consciousness, and the prodigals of fiction stay themselves upon the husks of epigram and cynicism, and in the place of artless aspiration are indeed in plain black and white very desperate characters.  It is after all only another pose—­the pose of not posing.  We, the common clay of the world of letters, must needs write in this way, because we cannot forget our foolish little selves in our work.  But some few there are who sit as gods above their private universes, and write without passion or vanity.  At least, so I have been told.  These be the true artists of letters, the white windows upon the truth of things.  We by comparison are but stained glass in our own honour, and do but obstruct the view with our halos and attitudes.  Yet even Shakespeare, the critics tell us—­and they say they know—­posed in the character of Hamlet.

After all, the pose novel method has at times attained to the level of literature.  Charlotte Bronte might possibly have found no other topic had she disdained the plain little woman with a shrewish tongue; and where had Charles Kingsley been if the vision of a curate rampant had not rejoiced his heart?  Still, I am not sorry that this novel is burned.  Even now it was ridiculous, and the time might have come when this book, full of high, if foolish aims, and the vain vast promise of well-meaning youth, had been too keen a reproach to be endured.  Three volumes of good intentions!  It is too much.  There was more than a novel burning just now.  After this I shall be in a position to take a humorist’s view of life.

THE VETERAN CRICKETER

My old cricketer was seized, he says, some score of years ago now, by sciatica, clutched indeed about the loins thereby, and forcibly withdrawn from the practice of the art; since when a certain predisposition to a corpulent habit has lacked its natural check of exercise, and a broadness almost Dutch has won upon him.  Were it not for this, which renders his contours and his receding aspect unseemly, he would be indeed a venerable-looking person, having a profile worthy of a patriarch, tinged though it may be with an unpatriarchal jollity, and a close curly beard like that of King David.  He lives by himself in a small cottage outside the village—­hating women with an unaccountable detestation—­and apparently earns a precarious livelihood, and certainly the sincere aversion of the country side, by umpiring in matches, and playing whist and “Nap” with such as will not be so discreet and economical as to bow before his superior merit.