When _Esmond_ first made its appearance in October 1852, it was not without distinguished and even formidable competitors. _Bleak House_ had reached its eighth number; and Bulwer was running _My Novel in Blackwood_. In _Fraser_, Kingsley was bringing out _Hypatia_; and Whyte Melville was preluding with _Digby Grand_. Charlotte Bronte must have been getting ready _Villette_ for the press; and Tennyson--undeterred by the fact that his hero had already been "dirged" by the indefatigable Tupper--was busy with his _Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington_.[65] The critics of the time were possibly embarrassed with this wealth of talent, for they were not, at the outset, immoderately enthusiastic over the new arrival. The _Athenaeum_ was by no means laudatory. _Esmond_ "harped upon the same string"; "wanted vital heat"; "touched no fresh fount of thought"; "introduced no novel forms of life"; and so forth. But the _Spectator_, in a charming greeting from George Brimley (since included in his _Essays_), placed the book, as a work of art, even above _Vanity Fair_ and _Pendennis_; the "serious and orthodox" _Examiner_, then under John Forster, was politely judicial; the _Daily News_ friendly; and the _Morning Advertiser_ enraptured. The book, this last declared, was the "beau-ideal of historical romance." On December 4 a second edition was announced. Then, on the 22nd, came the _Times_. Whether the _Times_ remembered and resented a certain delightfully contemptuous "Essay on Thunder and Small Beer," with which Thackeray retorted to its notice of _The Kickkburys on the Rhine_ (a thing hard to believe!) or whether it did not,--its report of _Esmond_ was distinctly hostile. In three columns, it commended little but the character of Marlborough, and the writer's "incomparably easy and unforced style." Thackeray thought that it had "absolutely stopped" the sale. But this seems inconsistent with the fact that the publisher sent him a supplementary cheque for L250 on account of _Esmond's_ success. Notes: [63] One is reminded of the accounts of Scott's "copy." "Page after page the writing runs on exactly as you read it in print"--says Mr. Mowbray Morris. "I was looking not long ago at the manuscript of _Kenilworth_ in the British Museum, and examined the end with particular care, thinking that the wonderful scene of Amy Robsart's death must surely have cost him some labour. They were the cleanest pages in the volume: I do not think there was a sentence altered or added in the whole chapter" (Lecture at Eton, _Macmillan's Magazine_ (1889), lx. pp. 158-9).