of others.  Not long since, a critic asserted that changes in one of my characters, resulting from total loss of memory, were preposterously impossible.  If the critic had consulted Ribot’s “Diseases of Memory,” or some experienced physician, he might have written more justly.  I do not feel myself competent to form a valuable opinion as to good art in writing, and I cannot help observing that the art doctors disagree wofully among themselves.  Truth to nature and the realities, and not the following of any school or fashion, has ever seemed the safest guide.  I sometimes venture to think I know a little about human nature.  My active life brought me in close contact with all kinds of people; there was no man in my regiment who hesitated to come to my tent or to talk confidentially by the campfire, while scores of dying men laid bare to me their hearts.  I at least know the nature that exists in the human breast.  It may be inartistic, or my use of it all wrong.  That is a question which time will decide, and I shall accept the verdict.  Over twelve years ago, certain oracles, with the voice of fate, predicted my speedy eclipse and disappearance.  Are they right in their adverse judgment?  I can truthfully say that now, as at the first, I wish to know the facts in the case.  The moment an author is conceited about his work, he becomes absurd and is passing into a hopeless condition.  If worthy to write at all, he knows that he falls far short of his ideals; if honest, he wishes to be estimated at his true worth, and to cast behind him the mean little Satan of vanity.  If he walks under a conscious sense of greatness, he is a ridiculous figure, for beholders remember the literary giants of other days and of his own time, and smile at the airs of the comparatively little man.  On the other hand, no self-respecting writer should ape the false deprecating “’umbleness” of Uriah Heep.  In short, he wishes to pass, like a coin, for just what he is worth.  Mr. Matthew Arnold was ludicrously unjust to the West when he wrote, “The Western States are at this moment being nourished and formed, we hear, on the novels of a native author called Roe.”  Why could not Mr. Arnold have taken a few moments to look into the bookstores of the great cities of the West, in order to observe for himself how the demand of one of the largest and most intelligent reading publics in the world is supplied?  He would have found that the works of Scott and Dickens were more liberally purchased and generally read than in his own land of “distinction.”  He should have discovered when in this country that American statesmen (?) are so solicitous about the intelligence of their constituents that they give publishers so disposed every opportunity to steal novels describing the nobility and English persons of distinction; that tons of such novels have been sold annually in the West, a thousand to one of the “author called Roe.”  The simple truth in the case is that in spite of this immense and cheap competition, my