This was very wrong of B; and it is needless to say I do not quote his system for imitation.  A man should tell his own story without plagiarism.  As to Truth being stranger than Fiction, that is all nonsense; it is a proverb set about by Nature to conceal her own want of originality.  I am not like that pessimist philosopher who assumed her malignity from the fact of the obliquity of the ecliptic; but the truth is, Nature is a pirate.  She has not hesitated to plagiarise from even so humble an individual as myself.  Years after I had placed my wicked baronet in his living tomb, she starved to death a hunter in Mexico under precisely similar circumstances; and so late as last month she has done the same in a forest in Styria.  Nay, on my having found occasion in a certain story (’a small thing, but my own’) to get rid of the whole wicked population of an island by suddenly submerging it in the sea, what did Nature do?  She waited for an insultingly short time (if her idea was that the story would be forgotten), and then reproduced the same circumstances on her own account (and without the least acknowledgment) in the Indian seas.  My attention was drawn to both these breaches of copyright by several correspondents, but I had no redress, the offender being beyond the jurisdiction of the Court of Chancery.

When the story-teller has finished his task and surmounted every obstacle to his own satisfaction, he has still a difficulty to face in the choice of a title.  He may invent indeed an eminently appropriate one, but it is by no means certain he will be allowed to keep it.  Of course he has done his best to steer clear of that borne by any other novel; but among the thousands that have been brought out within the last forty years, and which have been forgotten even if they were ever known, how can he know whether the same name has not been hit upon?  He goes to Stationers’ Hall to make inquiries; but—­mark the usefulness of that institution—­he finds that books are only entered there under their authors’ names.  His search is therefore necessarily futile, and he has to publish his story under the apprehension (only too well founded, as I have good cause to know) that the High Court of Chancery will prohibit its sale upon the ground of infringement of title.

PENNY FICTION.

It is now nearly a quarter of a century ago since a popular novelist revealed to the world in a well-known periodical the existence of the ‘Unknown Public;’ and a very curious revelation it was.  He showed us that the few thousands of persons who had hitherto imagined themselves to be the public—­so far, at least, as their being the arbiters of popularity in respect to writers of fiction was concerned—­were in fact nothing of the kind; that the subscribers to the circulating libraries, the members of book clubs, the purchasers of magazines and railway novels, might indeed have their favourites, but that these last were ‘nowhere,’ as respected the number of their backers, in comparison with novelists whose names and works appear in penny journals and nowhere else.