Yet which of us in his heart likes any of the Elizabethan dramatists except Shakespeare?  Are they in reality anything else than literary Struldbrugs?

“I conclude upon the whole that Aristophanes did not like any of the tragedians; yet no one will deny that this keen, witty, outspoken writer was as good a judge of literary value, and as able to see any beauties that the tragic dramas contained as nine-tenths, at any rate, of ourselves.  He had, moreover, the advantage of thoroughly understanding the standpoint from which the tragedians expected their work to be judged, and what was his conclusion?  Briefly it was little else than this, that they were a fraud or something very like it.  For my own part I cordially agree with him.  I am free to confess that with the exception perhaps of some of the Psalms of David I know no writings which seem so little to deserve their reputation.  I do not know that I should particularly mind my sisters reading them, but I will take good care never to read them myself.”

This last bit about the Psalms was awful, and there was a great fight with the editor as to whether or no it should be allowed to stand.  Ernest himself was frightened at it, but he had once heard someone say that the Psalms were many of them very poor, and on looking at them more closely, after he had been told this, he found that there could hardly be two opinions on the subject.  So he caught up the remark and reproduced it as his own, concluding that these psalms had probably never been written by David at all, but had got in among the others by mistake.

The essay, perhaps on account of the passage about the Psalms, created quite a sensation, and on the whole was well received.  Ernest’s friends praised it more highly than it deserved, and he was himself very proud of it, but he dared not show it at Battersby.  He knew also that he was now at the end of his tether; this was his one idea (I feel sure he had caught more than half of it from other people), and now he had not another thing left to write about.  He found himself cursed with a small reputation which seemed to him much bigger than it was, and a consciousness that he could never keep it up.  Before many days were over he felt his unfortunate essay to be a white elephant to him, which he must feed by hurrying into all sorts of frantic attempts to cap his triumph, and, as may be imagined, these attempts were failures.

He did not understand that if he waited and listened and observed, another idea of some kind would probably occur to him some day, and that the development of this would in its turn suggest still further ones.  He did not yet know that the very worst way of getting hold of ideas is to go hunting expressly after them.  The way to get them is to study something of which one is fond, and to note down whatever crosses one’s mind in reference to it, either during study or relaxation, in a little note-book kept always in the waistcoat pocket.  Ernest has come to know all about this now, but it took him a long time to find it out, for this is not the kind of thing that is taught at schools and universities.