The practical upshot of most of the foregoing memoranda is this: It so happened that I usually got into print when I desired it: that my very first article "professionally" written was printed in good company; and that I had few difficulties outside of my own personal peculiarities. But how was this? Just thus (shade of Artemus Ward!): I had for years made the working literature of the day a study; knew the things that tended to exclude a man's writing from magazines and newspapers, and the special points that I had to guard against. Is there anything wrong in suggesting that not one in a thousand of the class called "literary aspirants" has ever made the working literature of the hour a systematic study?

The articles, like the books, of the class called literary aspirants are usually rejected, even when they have merit, upon what may be termed points of literary form. This paragraph is good, and that is good, and this other is really fine; but the whole thing wants licking into shape. Thus, an editor or reviewer of experience and vision can almost certainly tell amateur work at a glance. See some interesting remarks by Mr. Herman Merivale in a recent "Junius" paper in the Cornhill upon the ease with which literary work is recognized as that of a practised pen. We are sometimes told and thousands of "aspirants" think with bitterness-that the distinction between the amateur and the practised writer is idle, because everybody is an amateur to begin with. But I have shown that this is not true. In spite of long practice in the use of the pen, I made working literature a deliberate study, and others have done the same; that is, they have not relied on mere aptitude. 66 Look,' says the writer of a formless novel, "look at 'Jane Eyre!"" Well, by all means look at "Jane Eyre;" you can hardly look at a more instructive case. Currer Bell did not succeed as an amateur; she had been a hard student of the conditions of success, and she attended to them so far as her knowledge went, and so far as she desired to use them. Of literary ambition proper she had none, nor-if I may speak of myself in the same sentence have I. But whatever one's motive or impulse may be in writing, he must pay some attention to matters of literary form, and he must comply with such of them as have a just and natural foundation. He is, in fact, as much bound to comply with these as he is bound not to com

Paradoxical as some may think it, the chief hindrance to honest literary success is literary vainglory to begin with. This involves splash, false fire, chaotic "out-lay" (to use a surveyor's phrase) of the work, and foolish and exaggerated ideas of the "success within reach. There was a one-volume novel published a year or two ago, in which a young journalist, whose suit had been rejected by a young lady's "'aughty" mother, and who is under a cloud for a time, makes money at a rate which must have set every journalist in England laughing, and then suddenly blazes out in the society of dukes and cabinet ministers because he has written a crushing exposure in a daily paper of the probable working of "clause 5" of a certain bill. This particular book was a very innocent one, and no more vainglorious than Currer Bell's notions of the Duke of Wellington.

In that specimen sheet of her handwriting given by Mrs. Gaskell in the memoir, she shows us the duke at the war-office, putting on his hat at five minutes to four, telling the clerks that they might go, and scattering "largess" among the clerks with a liberal hand as he takes his leave for the day. Sancta simplicitas! we cry; and there is an end. But every writing man knows that "aspirants," as a class, are eaten up with vainglory. They want distinction and the run of the pleasures of a "literary" life as they apprehend them. They have visions of the tenth thousand, and flaming reviews, and gorgeous society. I see with infinite amusement the ideas some people have of the sort of life I lead. They think-they almost tell me so in words-that I have always got my pocket full of orders for the theatre; that I can button-hole anybody I please; that I go to the queen's garden-parties; that I sit with a halo round my head in gilded saloons, saying, or hearing said, brilliant mots; that I drink champagne with actresses behind the scenes; and that, if they offend me, I shall at once put them in Punch or the Times. I have also been told-almost point-blank in some cases—that it was only my jealousy and desire to "keep others down that prevented my procuring immediate admission into periodicals for articles submitted to me by A. or B., which were perhaps of the silliest and most despicable quality. I have had this said or hinted to my face, or behind my back, about articles that were utterly unprintable, at times when my own papers had been waiting months