“Bulwer is older now—and so are we, eh! and may be said to have sown the wild oats of authorship. I was bored to death by Harold.” “And so was I. When I saw the announcement on the cover that Bulwer was about to take leave of fiction, I thought it was quite time.” “Harold being ‘the last of the Saxons,’ a new era commenced. The Caxton’s took me by surprise—at first I did not like it. The opening chapter was a cross of Tristrim Shandy and ‘The Doctor’—the coarseness of the one, and metaphysics of the other being a little tempered—‘weakened,’ I called it, and threw the book aside. I heard everybody talking of it, and wondered how they could praise such trash.” “Trash! the Caxton’s trash!” “Hold—I read it afterward; it was the only thing I could find on the counter of a country bookseller to solace and support me through a long journey, otherwise, I candidly confess, I should not have chosen it. You know the route, the winter of my Floridian jaunt. Shut up in the cars passing through those North Carolina pine-lands, without interest or variety, with not a soul that I knew, or any physiognomy that I liked well enough to make acquaintance with—how I blessed the dogged obstinacy that had hitherto made it a sealed book to me. I read till the twilight deepened, and then I borrowed the conductor’s lantern, and read again.” “And liked it as much as I do, no doubt.” “More than I can tell you. You know I never was given to enthusiastic criticism. It was so new, so varied—the sentiment more than the incident, I mean. When ‘Alice’ was written, I should not have fancied the Caxton’s. I could not have understood the author’s reasonings—for you know it is, after all, more a philosophy than a romance.” “Sound philosophy, too—nothing harsh or cynical in it, as one might naturally have expected from the domestic life of the author.” “And that is the charm of ‘My Novel,’ it is the same subject continued; a homily against worldliness and selfishness, in the most charming guise, example as well as precept—and that so naturally drawn. Who does not pity Audley Egerton—giving life and soul to political ambition, or despise his sycophant Leslie, with his scheming, plotting brain.” “Outwitted at last, of course. ‘Honesty the best policy,’ is the burden of the tale. Yet I pity Randall more than his dupe, your namesake, Frank; the one has _mens conscia recti_ to support him in all his difficulties. I can fancy Leslie’s situation exactly. Ambitious by descent, as it were, and for the honor of his ancestors, as well as for personal ease and distinction, stung by the destitution and utter neglect of his home, refined in taste, one scarcely wonders that he becomes unscrupulous of means to the end.”