costermonger of any kind whatsoever ever did or could speak in that way――well, then the world will say that the picture of the costermonger is untrue and the language of the costermonger is inappropriate and unnatural――a conclusion summed up by saying that the author can’t draw a costermonger. His personality won’t blend with costermongers――perhaps it will with dukes――he had better confine himself to the latter. The author may take comfort in the thought that there are sure to be a few persons enamoured of singularity, and perhaps liking to be wiser than their neighbours, who will declare that his costermongers are of a superior brand to all others, and are indeed the only complete and veritable revelation of the quiddity of the costermonger ever set before the world since that planet began its journey round the sun. We arrive, then――as we draw near the close of these remarks――rather rambling remarks, I am afraid――at the conclusion, perhaps a conclusion with a touch of the paradoxical in it――that in dialogue the writer is always trying to do what in the nature of the case he can never do completely. He is always trying to present objectively a personality other than his own. He never fully succeeds, and it would be to the ruin of his work as literature, if he did. The creator is always there in the created, and it is probably true to say that he is there in greater degree just in proportion to the force of his personality and the power of his creative faculty. Is the greater writer then less true to life than the smaller? I am not going to be as surprising as that――for, though he puts in more of himself, the greater writer sees and puts in a lot more of the objective costermonger also. But it is, I think, true to say that what we get from him is not, in the strict use of words, anything that exists. It is a hypothetical person, if I may so put it――it is a compound of what the author takes from the world outside and what he himself contributes. The result is, then――to take an instance or two――in Diana of the Crossways, not an actual historical character, but what Mr. Meredith would have been had he been that lady――not an actual skipper of a coastwise barge, but what Mr. Jacobs would have been had he been skipper of a barge――not an actual detective, but what Gaboriau, or Wilkie Collins, or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have been had he been a detective, or, to take extreme cases, not the inhabitants of the jungle, but all the varieties which Mr. Kipling’s fertile genius would have assumed if he had had to people the jungle all off his own bat. True as this is of all imaginative writing, it is most true of dialogue. That is an attempt at direct impersonation, as direct as the actor’s on the stage――and it is and can be successful only within the limits indicated. The author, like the actor, must go on trying to do what he never can and never ought to succeed in doing――namely, obliterating his own personality. The