“And how do you like ‘My Novel,’ Frank?”
It was a very natural question under the circumstances. We had just finished two excellent cigars. St. Julian had an exquisite choice in the article, which I could fully appreciate. The fire was shining glowing red through the polished bars of the grate—the curtains were down, and the gas lighted. The library-table was strewn with papers, and new publications, and among the rest “Blackwood,” in its unpretending brown cover, laid half open, and the paper-cutter thrust between the leaves. That knife was a great favorite with my friend, who had brought it from Switzerland. The blade was of burnished silver, the handle the delicate foot of a chamois, preserved most perfectly. I might have hunted from Paris to Berne without lighting upon it; but these things always seemed to fall in the way of St. Julian, as if by the magnetic attraction of his refined taste.
The library could scarcely have been dignified by that title. It was a small room, suited to my friend’s not over ample means, and fitted up with more of the bachelor air than the lounging-rooms of most Benedicts contrive to retain. Book-cases and tables of black walnut, the books being more valuable as rare editions, than from the extent of the collection, a few excellent engravings, and one beautiful head in oil, completed the appointments. We had dined, and nuts and wine were on the table before us. Mrs. St. Julian had absented herself on the plea of nursery engagements, possibly she thought we might like to chat without even her gentle restraint, of our old bachelor days. Considerate woman! Would that more of my married friends had possessed themselves of such a household treasure!
“How do I like Bulwer’s last? Just the question you asked years ago, St. Julian, in the days of Pelham and Earnest Maltravers, when maiden aunts held up their hands in pious horror at the mere mention of his name, and young ladies doted on the “dear wicked books,” just because they were proscribed.”
“Exactly,” nodded St. Julian, knocking the silvery ashes from the tip of his Figaro.
“Bulwer is older now—and so are we, eh! and may be said to have sown the wild oats of authorship. I was bored to death by Harold.”
“And so was I. When I saw the announcement on the cover that Bulwer was about to take leave of fiction, I thought it was quite time.”
“Harold being ‘the last of the Saxons,’ a new era commenced. The Caxton’s took me by surprise—at first I did not like it. The opening chapter was a cross of Tristrim Shandy and ‘The Doctor’—the coarseness of the one, and metaphysics of the other being a little tempered—‘weakened,’ I called it, and threw the book aside. I heard everybody talking of it, and wondered how they could praise such trash.”
“Trash! the Caxton’s trash!”
“Hold—I read it afterward; it was the only thing I could find on the counter of a country bookseller to solace and support me through a long journey, otherwise, I candidly confess, I should not have chosen it. You know the route, the winter of my Floridian jaunt. Shut up in the cars passing through those North Carolina pine-lands, without interest or variety, with not a soul that I knew, or any physiognomy that I liked well enough to make acquaintance with—how I blessed the dogged obstinacy that had hitherto made it a sealed book to me. I read till the twilight deepened, and then I borrowed the conductor’s lantern, and read again.”