With some of these correspondents, however, it is impossible (independent of their needs) not to feel an earnest sympathy; they have evidently not only aspirations, but considerable mental gifts, though these have unhappily been cultivated to such little purpose for the object they have in view that they might almost as well have been left untilled.  In spite of what I ventured to urge respecting the advantage of knowing ’science, history, politics, English literature, and the art of composition,’ they ‘don’t see why’ they shouldn’t get on without them.  Especially with those who aspire to write fiction (which, by its intrinsic attractiveness no less than by the promise it affords of golden grain, tempts the majority), it is quite pitiful to note how they cling to that notion of ‘the corn-sieve,’ and cannot be persuaded that story-telling requires an apprenticeship like any other calling.  They flatter themselves that they can weave plots as the spider spins his thread from (what let us delicately term) his inner consciousness, and fondly hope that intuition will supply the place of experience.  Some of them, with a simplicity that recalls the days of Dick Whittington, think that ‘coming up to London’ is the essential step to this line of business, as though the provinces contained no fellow-creatures worthy to be depicted by their pen, or as though, in the metropolis, Society would at once exhibit itself to them without concealment, as fashionable beauties bare themselves to the photographers.

This is, of course, the laughable side of the affair, but, to me at least, it has also a serious one; for, to my considerable embarrassment and distress, I find that my well-meaning attempt to point out the advantages of literature as a profession has received a much too free translation, and implanted in many minds hopes that are not only sanguine but Utopian.

For what was written in the essay alluded to I have nothing to reproach myself with, for I told no more than the truth.  Nor does the unsettlement of certain young gentleman’s futures (since by their own showing they were to the last degree unstable to begin with) affect me so much as their parents and guardians appear to expect; but I am sorry to have shaken however undesignedly, the ‘pillars of domestic peace’ in any case, and desirous to make all the reparation in my power.  I regret most heartily that I am unable to place all literary aspirants in places of emolument and permanency out of hand; but really (with the exception perhaps of the Universal Provider in Westbourne Grove) this is hardly to be expected of any man.  The gentleman who raised the devil, and was compelled to furnish occupation for him, affords in fact the only appropriate parallel to my unhappy case.  ’If you can do nothing to provide my son with another place,’ writes one indignant Paterfamilias, ‘at least you owe it to him’ (as if I, and not Nature herself, had made the lad dissatisfied with his high stool in a solicitor’s office!) ’to give him some practical hints by which he may become a successful writer of fiction.’