averagely-witty fellow, you could not have failed to produce something moderately readable? Tell me, was not this so? Did you not write only when you were in the vein? Did you not get every Lettered Friend to "file" your manuscript before you sent it to the printers? Did you not have twenty proofs (at least) before the type was sent to press? Did you not cancel half-adozen sheets during the process of machining? Did you not pay Lettered Friends aforesaid to review and quote you in the papers—and, finally, were you not in the end eighty pounds seventeen shillings and some odd halfpence out of pocket even after all your assiduousness on behalf of your maiden volume's welfare? 'Ah me!-when I contrast the conditions of your labour with those of mine-when I look around me and see the room in which I am writing, the babes who are clustering (bless them!) about my knees, the pale, thin ink in which I am pouring myself on paper, and the wretched cross-nibbed pen which sticks its pasterns-the beast!—into the copy as I push along,-when I see all this, I am almost tempted to grow vain, and say, if I only knew the felicities of amateur authorship, what wonderful things I could produce!' getic tone. Perhaps I ought not to have adopted an apolo'What do I care,' some readers may say, 'under what circumstances your friend wrote ?' There are other readers, however, I hope and believe, who will not echo the query. At any rate, I wish to record my impression-if it were only mine, I know that it would not be worth much, but far better judges share it-I wish to record my impression that under Frank Fowler's grave in Brompton sleeps one, richly gifted by nature, who might have ripened into a distinguished writer. Little does he care now, however, for such distinction. It would deepen the peace of his rest if he knew how all who really understood him loved him: bitterly they mourn |