and drawing a feeble satisfaction from the faces of his books.  And for the man of letters there is more than the mere labour:  he writes his book, and has frequently the mortification of seeing it neglected or torn to pieces.  Above all men, he longs for sympathy, recognition, applause.  He respects his fellow-creatures, because he beholds in him a possible reader.  To write a book, to send it forth to the world and the critics, is to a sensitive person like plunging mother-naked into tropic waters where sharks abound.  It is true that, like death, the terror of criticism lives most in apprehension; still, to have been frequently criticised, and to be constantly liable to it, are disagreeable items in a man’s life.  Most men endure criticism with commendable fortitude, just as most criminals when under the drop conduct themselves with calmness.  They bleed, but they bleed inwardly.  To be flayed in the Saturday Review, for instance,—­a whole amused public looking on,—­is far from pleasant; and, after the operation, the ordinary annoyances of life probably magnify themselves into tortures.  The grasshopper becomes a burden.  Touch a flayed man ever so lightly, and with ever so kindly an intention, and he is sure to wince.  The skin of the man of letters is peculiarly sensitive to the bite of the critical mosquito; and he lives in a climate in which such mosquitoes swarm.  He is seldom stabbed to the heart—­he is often killed by pin-pricks.

But, to leave palisade and outwork, and come to the interior of the citadel, it may be said that great writers, although they must ever remain shining objects of regard to us, are not exempted from ordinary limitations and conditions.  They are cabined, cribbed, confined, even as their more prosaic brethren.  It is in the nature of every man to be endued with that he works in.  Thus, in course of time, the merchant becomes bound up in his ventures and his ledger; an indefinable flavour of the pharmacopoeia lingers about the physician; the bombasine and horse-hair of the lawyer eat into his soul—­his experiences are docketed in a clerkly hand, bound together with red tape, and put away in professional pigeon-holes.  A man naturally becomes leavened by the profession which he has adopted.  He thinks, speaks, and dreams “shop,” as the colloquial phrase has it.  Men of letters are affected by their profession just as merchants, physicians, and lawyers are.  In course of time the inner man becomes stained with ink, like blotting-paper.  The agriculturist talks constantly of bullocks—­the man of letters constantly of books.  The printing-press seems constantly in his immediate neighbourhood.  He is stretched on the rack of an unfavourable review,—­he is lapped in the Elysium of a new edition.  The narrowing effect of a profession is in every man a defect, albeit an inevitable one.  Byron, who had a larger amount of common sense than any poet of his day, tells us, in “Beppo,”