What should we think of the painter who repainted his picture after sale, or of a sculptor who sawed off an arm from his statue, and affixed another? Both picture and statue may have many faults; they probably have; but such as they went out from the studio they must remain. This is the common morality, the elementary honour, of art, and a similar canon should certainly lie upon literature. Yet some writers have of late presumed that they had a right to change the ending of their romances when these were already well known to their readers. They would urge, I suppose, that they have a right to do what they like with their own. But your work once given to the public is no more your own than your daughter is when you have married her, and she has become the _Gaia_ of her _Gaius_. Besides, there is an unspoken good faith on the part of the author which should be observed in his relations towards the public. He should give them nothing which is incomplete; nothing, at least, which is not as harmonious as it is in his power to create. Every work of fiction requires to be long dreamed of, long thought of, clearly seen in the mind before written; it ought to be no more susceptible of change than a conclusion in Euclid. To the writer, as to the reader of a story, it should seem absolutely true; the actors in it should appear absolutely real. The illusion of reality is only strong in the reader according to the strength of that illusion in the writer; but some such illusion must always exist whilst the reader reads fiction, or fiction would have no attraction for anyone. The writer who alters his romance after it has once appeared destroys this illusion, and says effectively to his public, 'What fools you are to take me seriously!' Moreover, he insults them, for he tells them that he has set before them a half-finished and immature thing, about which he has entirely changed his mind. He is like a cook who should snatch off the table a dish just placed on it because he wished to alter the flavour. A Vätel or a Soyer would not do that: if he had made a mistake he would abide by it, though he might kill himself in despite at it. In the course of a literary or artistic life, or any other life from which the blessing of privacy has been lost, there are many wrongs met with which are real and great wrongs, yet which must be endured because they cannot be remedied by law suits, and there is no other kind of tribunal open; nothing analogous, for instance, to the German Courts of Honour in military matters.