This class of writer is not altogether unconscious of the absence of dramatic interest in his composition.  He writes to his editor (I have read a thousand such letters):  ’It has been my aim, in the enclosed contribution, to steer clear of the faults of the sensational school of fiction, and I have designedly abstained from stimulating the unwholesome taste for excitement.’  In which high moral purpose he has undoubtedly succeeded; but, unhappily, in nothing else.  It is quite true that some writers of fiction neglect ‘story’ almost entirely, but then they are perhaps the greatest writers of all.  Their genius is so transcendent that they can afford to dispense with ‘plot;’ their humour, their pathos, and their delineation of human nature are amply sufficient, without any such meretricious attraction; whereas our too ambitious young friend is in the position of the needy knife-grinder, who has not only no story to tell, but in lieu of it only holds up his coat and breeches ’torn in the scuffle’—­the evidence of his desperate and ineffectual struggles with literary composition.  I have known such an aspirant to instance Miss Gaskell’s ‘Cranford’ as a parallel to the backboneless flesh-and-bloodless creation of his own immature fancy, and to recommend the acceptance of the latter upon the ground of their common rejection of startling plot and dramatic situation.  The two compositions have certainly that in common; and the flawless diamond has some things, such as mere sharpness and smoothness, in common with the broken beer-bottle.

Many young authors of the class I have in my mind, while more modest as respects their own merits, are even still less so as regards their expectations from others.  ’If you will kindly furnish me with a subject,’ so runs a letter now before me, ’I am sure I could do very well; my difficulty is that I never can think of anything to write about.  Would you be so good as to oblige me with a plot for a novel?’ It would have been infinitely more reasonable of course, and much cheaper, for me to grant it, if the applicant had made a request for my watch and chain;[6] but the marvel is that folks should feel any attraction towards a calling for which Nature has denied them even the raw materials.  It is true that there are some great talkers who have manifestly nothing to say, but they don’t ask their hearers to supply them with a topic of conversation in order to be set agoing.

[6] To compare small things with great, I remember Sir Walter Scott being thus applied to for some philanthropic object.  ‘Money,’ said the applicant, who had some part proprietorship in a literary miscellany, ’I don’t ask for, since I know you have many claims upon your purse; but would you write us a little paper gratuitously for the “Keepsake"?’

‘My great difficulty,’ the would-be writer of fiction often says, ’is how to begin;’ whereas in fact the difficulty arises rather from his not knowing how to end.  Before undertaking the