enough now.  Am I better than I was then? oh, no!  One truth discovered, one pang of regret at not being able to express it, is worth all the fluency and flippancy in the world.”  This regretful looking back to the past, when emotions were keen and sharp, and when thought wore the novel dress of a stranger, and this dissatisfaction with the acquirements of the present, is common enough with the man of letters.  The years have come and gone, and he is conscious that he is not intrinsically richer,—­he has only learned to assort and display his riches to advantage.  His wares have neither increased in quantity nor improved in quality,—­he has only procured a window in a leading thoroughfare.  He can catch his butterflies more cunningly, he can pin them on his cards more skilfully, but their wings are fingered and tawdry compared with the time when they winnowed before him in the sunshine over the meadows of youth.  This species of regret is peculiar to the class of which I am speaking, and they often discern failure in what the world counts success.  The veteran does not look back to the time when he was in the awkward squad; the accountant does not sigh over the time when he was bewildered by the mysteries of double-entry.  And the reason is obvious.  The dexterity which time and practice have brought to the soldier and the accountant is pure gain:  the dexterity of expression which time and practice have brought to the writer is gain too, in its way, but not quite so pure.  It may have been cultivated and brought to its degree of excellence at the expense of higher things.  The man of letters lives by thought and expression, and his two powers may not be perfectly balanced.  And, putting aside its effect on the reader, and through that, on the writer’s pecuniary prosperity, the tragedy of want of equipoise lies in this.  When the writer expresses his thought, it is immediately dead to him, however life-giving it may be to others; he pauses midway in his career, he looks back over his uttered past—­brown desert to him, in which there is no sustenance—­he looks forward to the green unuttered future, and beholding its narrow limits, knows it is all that he can call his own,—­on that vivid strip he must pasture his intellectual life.

Is the literary life, on the whole, a happy one?  Granted that the writer is productive, that he possesses abundance of material, that he has secured the ear of the world, one is inclined to fancy that no life could be happier.  Such a man seems to live on the finest of the wheat.  If a poet, he is continually singing; if a novelist, he is supreme in his ideal world; if a humourist, everything smiles back upon his smile; if an essayist, he is continually saying the wisest, most memorable things.  He breathes habitually the serener air which ordinary mortals can only at intervals respire, and in their happiest moments.  Such conceptions of great writers are to some extent erroneous.  Through the medium of their books