and abundant flocks, rather than that he should sink into death among the ashes, refusing to curse God for his reverses.  Its view of existence after death is that Dives should join Lazarus in Abraham’s bosom.  To succeed, one must compromise with this comfortable feeing, sacrificing, if needs be, the artistic conscience, because the place of the minstrel in England is after the banquet, when the warriors are pleasantly tired, have put off the desire of meat and drink, and the fire roars and crackles in the hearth.  When Ruskin deserted his clouds and peaks, his sunsets and sunrises, and devoured his soul over the brutalities and uglinesses and sordid inequalities of life, it was all put down to the obscure pressure of mental disease.  Ophelia does not sob and struggle in the current, but floats dreamily to death in a bed of meadow-flowers.

October 21, 1888.

Let me try to recollect for my own amusement how it was that my last book grew up and took shape.  How well I remember the day and the hour when the first thought came to me!  Some one was dining here, and told a story about a friend of his, and an unhappy misunderstanding between him and a girl whom he loved, or thought he loved.  A figure, two figures, a scene, a conversation, came into my head, absolutely and perfectly life-like.  I lay awake half the night, I remember, over it.  How did those people come to be in exactly that situation? how would it develop?  At first it was just the scene by itself, nothing more; a room which filled itself with furniture.  There were doors—­where did they lead to?  There were windows—­where did they look out?  The house was full, too, of other people, whose quiet movements I heard.  One person entered the room, and then another; and so the story opened out.  I saw the wrong word spoken, I saw the mist of doubt and distress that filled the girl’s mind; I felt that I would have given anything to intervene, to explain; but instead of speaking out, the girl confided in the wrong person, who had an old grudge against the man, so old that it had become instinctive and irrational.  So the thing evolved itself.  Then at one time the story got entangled and confused.  I could go no further.  The characters were by this time upon the scene, but they could not speak.  I then saw that I had made a mistake somewhere.  The scaffolding was all taken down, spar by spar, and still the defect was not revealed.  I must go, I saw, backwards; and so I felt my way, like a man groping in the dark, into what had gone before, and suddenly came out into the light.  It was a mistake far back in the conception.  I righted it, and the story began to evolve itself again; this time with a delicate certainty, that made me feel I was on the track at last.  An impressive scene was sacrificed—­it was there that my idea had gone wrong!  As to the writing of it, I cannot say it was an effort.  It wrote itself.  I was not creating; I was describing and selecting.  There was one scene in particular, a scene which has