than I that your representative author face to face with your
representative publisher was, is, and ever will be, at a ludicrous
disadvantage? And there is no reason in the nature and the decency of
things why this wrong should not by some contrivance be remedied. A big,
blusterous, genial brute of a Trollope could very fairly hold his own,
and exact at all events an acceptable share in the profits of his work. A
shrewd and vigorous man of business such as Dickens, aided by a lawyer
who was his devoted friend, could do even better, and, in reaping
sometimes more than his publisher, redress the ancient injustice. But
pray, what of Charlotte Bronte? Think of that grey, pinched life, the
latter years of which would have been so brightened had Charlotte Bronte
received but, let us say, one third of what, in the same space of time,
the publisher gained by her books. I know all about this; alas! no man
better. None the less do I loathe and sicken at the manifold baseness,
the vulgarity unutterable, which, as a result of the new order, is
blighting our literary life. It is not easy to see how, in such an
atmosphere, great and noble books can ever again come into being. May
it, perhaps, be hoped that once again the multitude will be somehow
touched with disgust?--that the market for "literary" news of this
costermonger sort will some day fail?

Dickens. Why, there too was a disclosure of literary methods. Did not
Forster make known to all and sundry exactly how Dickens' work was done,
and how the bargains for its production were made? The multitudinous
public saw him at his desk, learnt how long he sat there, were told that
he could not get on without having certain little ornaments before his
eyes, and that blue ink and a quill pen were indispensable to his
writing; and did all this information ever chill the loyalty of a single
reader? There was a difference, in truth, between the picture of Charles
Dickens sitting down to a chapter of his current novel, and that of the