Descending from the woody heights upon London, Diana would have said that her only anxiety concerned young Mr. Arthur Rhodes, whose position she considered precarious, and who had recently taken a drubbing for venturing to show a peep of his head, like an early crocus, in the literary market.  Her Antonia’s last book had been reviewed obediently to smart taps from the then commanding baton of Mr. Tonans, and Mr. Whitmonby’s choice picking of specimens down three columns of his paper.  A Literary Review (Charles Rainer’s property) had suggested that perhaps ‘the talented authoress might be writing too rapidly’; and another, actuated by the public taste of the period for our ’vigorous homely Saxon’ in one and two syllable words, had complained of a ’tendency to polysyllabic phraseology.’  The remainder, a full majority, had sounded eulogy with all their band-instruments, drum, trumpet, fife, trombone.  Her foregoing work had raised her to Fame, which is the Court of a Queen when the lady has beauty and social influence, and critics are her dedicated courtiers, gaping for the royal mouth to be opened, and reserving the kicks of their independent manhood for infamous outsiders, whom they hoist in the style and particular service of pitchforks.  They had fallen upon a little volume of verse, ’like a body of barn-door hens on a stranger chick,’ Diana complained; and she chid herself angrily for letting it escape her forethought to propitiate them on the author’s behalf.  Young Rhodes was left with scarce a feather; and what remained to him appeared a preposterous ornament for the decoration of a shivering and welted poet.  He laughed, or tried the mouth of laughter.  ANTONIA’s literary conscience was vexed at the different treatment she had met and so imperatively needed that the reverse of it would have threatened the smooth sailing of her costly household.  A merry-go-round of creditors required a corresponding whirligig of receipts.

She felt mercenary, debased by comparison with the well-scourged verse-mason, Orpheus of the untenanted city, who had done his publishing ingenuously for glory:  a good instance of the comic-pathetic.  She wrote to Emma, begging her to take him in at Copsley for a few days:  ’I told you I had no troubles.  I am really troubled about this poor boy.  He has very little money and has embarked on literature.  I cannot induce any of my friends to lend him a hand.  Mr. Redworth gruffly insists on his going back to his law-clerk’s office and stool, and Mr. Dacier says that no place is vacant.  The reality of Lord Dannisburgh’s death is brought before me by my helplessness.  He would have made him an assistant private Secretary, pending a Government appointment, rather than let me plead in vain.’