do exactly right.  All you can do is to make as sure as possible; and for that there is but one rule.  Nothing should be done in a hurry that can be done slowly.  It is no use to write a book and put it by for nine or even ninety years; for in the writing you will have partly convinced yourself; the delay must precede any beginning; and if you meditate a work of art, you should first long roll the subject under the tongue to make sure you like the flavour, before you brew a volume that shall taste of it from end to end; or if you propose to enter on the field of controversy, you should first have thought upon the question under all conditions, in health as well as in sickness, in sorrow as well as in joy.  It is this nearness of examination necessary for any true and kind writing, that makes the practice of the art a prolonged and noble education for the writer.

There is plenty to do, plenty to say, or to say over again, in the meantime.  Any literary work which conveys faithful facts or pleasing impressions is a service to the public.  It is even a service to be thankfully proud of having rendered.  The slightest novels are a blessing to those in distress, not chloroform itself a greater.  Our fine old sea-captain’s life was justified when Carlyle soothed his mind with The King’s Own or Newton Forster.  To please is to serve; and so far from its being difficult to instruct while you amuse, it is difficult to do the one thoroughly without the other.  Some part of the writer or his life will crop out in even a vapid book; and to read a novel that was conceived with any force is to multiply experience and to exercise the sympathies.

Every article, every piece of verse, every essay, every entre-filet, is destined to pass, however swiftly, through the minds of some portion of the public, and to colour, however transiently, their thoughts.  When any subject falls to be discussed, some scribbler on a paper has the invaluable opportunity of beginning its discussion in a dignified and human spirit; and if there were enough who did so in our public press, neither the public nor the Parliament would find it in their minds to drop to meaner thoughts.  The writer has the chance to stumble, by the way, on something pleasing, something interesting, something encouraging, were it only to a single reader.  He will be unfortunate, indeed, if he suit no one.  He has the chance, besides, to stumble on something that a dull person shall be able to comprehend; and for a dull person to have read anything and, for that once, comprehended it, makes a marking epoch in his education.