“Tell me, and the theme is a pleasanter one, do you take or give yourself a holiday at this season? You surely do not treat the old age and last moments of the year so disparagingly as to make working days of them! Well, then, come up and give us three or four of them here. I make no excuse for a dull house, probably you wouldn’t come if it were a gay one, but such as it is you will be a very welcome guest, and I am sure that a little new venue and new witnesses in the box would be of service to you.”
To Mr John Blackwood.
[Undated.]
“My present plan is of such a book as would make an ordinary 3-vol. novel, for which I have, I believe, sufficient material for a good story, and a stirring one. I have not, however, written one line beyond what I have sent you, so that to trust me you must take my own security.
“Serial-writing not alone adapts itself to my habits, but actually chimes in with a certain mixture of indecision and facility which marks whatever I do in this way—that the success or failure of any character before the world has always guided me, whether to work out the creation more fully and perfectly, or to abandon it quietly. To give an instance,—I could give over fifty,—Micky Free was never intended to figure in more than a passing scene in ‘Charles O’Malley’; but the public took to him, and so I gave him to them freely.
“All these ‘Confessions of Harry Lorrequer’ will neither exhibit my artistic or constructive power in a very high light. N’importe! if you take me, you must take me as they do the two-year-olds—with all my engagements, which are to write in the only way I have hitherto done, or I honestly believe I could do at all.
“As to money, a post bill, or your cheque, quite as negotiable, will suit me perfectly. I hope I am legible, but I have my fears, for I jammed my fingers in a block on board my boat t’other day, and have not used a pen since till now.”
END OF THE FIRST VOLUME. PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS