“One hates an author that’s all author; fellows
  In foolscap uniforms turn’d up with ink.”

And his lordship’s “hate” in the matter is understandable enough.  In his own day, Scott and himself were almost the only distinguished authors who were not “all authors,” just as Mr. Helps and Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton are almost the only representatives of the class in ours.  This professional taint not only resides in the writer, impairing his fulness and completion; it flows out of him into his work, and impairs it also.  It is the professional character which authorship has assumed which has taken individuality and personal flavour from so much of our writing, and prevented to a large extent the production of enduring books.  Our writing is done too hurriedly, and to serve a purpose too immediate.  Literature is not so much an art as a manufacture.  There is a demand, and too many crops are taken off the soil; it is never allowed to lie fallow, and to nourish itself in peacefulness and silence.  When so many cups are to be filled, too much water is certain to be put into the teapot.  Letters have become a profession, and probably of all professions it is, in the long run, the least conducive to personal happiness.  It is the most precarious.  In it, above all others, to be weak is to be miserable.  It is the least mechanical, consequently the most exhausting; and in its higher walks it deals with a man’s most vital material—­utilises his emotions, trades on his faculties of love and imagination, uses for its own purposes the human heart by which he lives.  These things a man requires for himself; and when they are in a large proportion transported to an ideal world, they make the ideal world all the more brilliant and furnished, and leave his ordinary existence all the more arid and commonplace.  You cannot spend money and have it; you cannot use emotion and possess it.  The poet who sings loudly of love and love’s delights, may in the ordinary intercourse of life be all the colder for his singing.  The man who has been moved while describing an imaginary death-bed to-day, is all the more likely to be unmoved while standing by his friend’s grave to-morrow.  Shakspeare, after emerging from the moonlight in the Verona orchard, and Romeo and Juliet’s silvery interchange of vows, was, I fear me, not marvellously enamoured of the autumn on Ann Hathaway’s cheek.  It is in some such way as this that a man’s books may impoverish his life; that the fire and heat of his genius may make his hearth all the colder.  From considerations like these, one can explain satisfactorily enough to one’s self the domestic misadventures of men of letters—­of poets especially.  We know the poets only in their books; their wives know them out of them.  Their wives see the other side of the moon; and we have been made pretty well aware how they have appreciated that.