[401] Ibid., 449.
[402] The Way We Live Now, 1–2. In this connection we are also informed that “She did not fall in love, she did not wilfully flirt, she did not commit herself; but she smiled and whispered, and made confidences and looked out of her own eyes into men’s eyes as though there might be some mysterious bond between her and them—if only mysterious circumstances would permit it. But the end of it all was to induce some one to do something which would cause a publisher to give her good payment for indifferent writing, or an editor to be lenient when, upon the merits of the case, he should have been severe.”
[403] This proves efficacious, since Mr. Booker, though “an Aristides among reviewers,” cannot resist the bait of a favorable notice of his Tale, “even though written by the hand of a female literary charlatan, and he would have no compunction as to repaying the service by fulsome praise in The Literary Chronicle.”
[404] Nightmare Abbey, 78.
[405] What Will He Do with It? Preface to Chap. IV, Bk. VI.
[406] Sketches and Travels: in London, 268. Cf. Taine’s comment that Thackeray “does as a novelist what Hobbes does as a philosopher. Almost everywhere, when he describes fine sentiments, he derives them from an ugly source.” Hist. of Eng. Lit., IV, 188.
[407] “Of this national disease, this indifference to reality, the main bulk of nineteenth century English fiction has died already or must soon be dead.” Gosse: Eng. Lit. in the Nineteenth Cent. 221.
[408] Letters, I, 156.
[409] Godolphin, 106–7. Cf. Pelham, 106 ff. for a long discussion of the novel.
[410] Autobiography, 206. But on another page he describes the sense of intimate reality he had of his beloved Barsetshire, and how vivid was the mental map he had made of it.