all of these things, and they do not amuse me, though I confess that I thought they would.  I feel in this rather as Tennyson felt—­that I dislike contemptuous criticism, and do not value praise—­except the praise of a very few, the masters of the craft.  And this one does not get, because the great men are mostly too much occupied in producing their own masterpieces to have the time or inclination to appraise others.  Yet I am sure there is a vile fibre of ambition lurking in me, interwoven with my nature, which I cannot exactly disentangle.  I very earnestly desire to do good and fine work, to write great books.  If I genuinely and critically approved of my own work, I could go on writing for the mere pleasure of it, in the face of universal neglect.  But one may take it for granted that unless one is working on very novel and original lines—­and I am not—­the good qualities of one’s work are not likely to escape attention.  The reason why Keats, and Shelley, and Tennyson, and Wordsworth were decried, was because their work was so unusual, so new, that conventional critics could not understand it.  But I am using a perfectly familiar medium, and there is a large and acute band of critics who are looking out for interesting work in the region of novels.  Besides I have arrived at the point of having a vogue, so that anything I write would be treated with a certain respect.  Where my ambition comes in is in the desire not to fall below my standard.  I suppose that while I feel that I do not rate the judgment of the ordinary critic highly, I have an instinctive sense that my work is worthy of his admiration.  The pain I feel is the sort of pain that an athlete feels who has established, say, a record in high-jumping, and finds that he can no longer hurl his stiffening legs and portly frame over the lath.  Well, I have always held strongly that men ought to know when to stop.  There is nothing more melancholy and contemptible than to see a successful man, who has brought out a brood of fine things, sitting meekly on addled eggs, or, still worse, squatting complacently among eggshells.  It is like the story of the old tiresome Breton farmer whose wife was so annoyed by his ineffective fussiness, that she clapt him down to sit on a clutch of stone eggs for the rest of his life.  How often have I thought how deplorable it was to see a man issuing a series of books, every one of which is feebler than its predecessor, dishing up the old characters, the stale ideas, the used-up backgrounds.  I have always hoped that some one would be kind and brave enough to tell me when I did that.  But now that the end seems to have come to me naturally and spontaneously, I cannot accept my defeat.  I am like the monkey of whom Frank Buckland wrote, who got into the kettle when the water was lukewarm, and found the outer air so cold whenever he attempted to leave it, that he was eventually very nearly boiled alive.  The fact that my occupation is gone leaves life hollow to the core.  Perhaps