The labor was partly of his own making, but after all was consequent chiefly upon the sense of art which led the author to do much more than simply collect and reprint what he had written _currente calamo_ in the _Courier_ and _Standard_. The great popularity attained by the successive numbers showed him that he had hit the mark, but also the conception of the whole grew in his mind, and he seized the opportunity which reprinting afforded, to shape his satire and give it a body, by filling out the characters who constituted his _dramatis personæ_. “When I came to collect [the papers] and publish them in a volume,” he wrote in 1859 to Mr. Hughes, in the letter already quoted, I conceived my parson-editor with his pedantry and verbosity, his amiable vanity and superiority to the verses he was editing, as a fitting artistic background and foil. It gave me the chance, too, of glancing obliquely at many things which were beyond the horizon of my other characters. I was told afterwards that my Parson Wilbur was only Jedediah Cleishbotham over again, and I dare say it may be so; but I drew him from the life as well as I could, and for the authentic reasons I have mentioned.” There was a slight undercurrent of reference to his own father in this characterization. “My father,” he wrote Hughes, “was as proud of his pedigree as a Talbot or Stanley could be, and Parson Wilbur’s genealogical mania was a private joke between us.”[79] So thoroughly did he think himself into the artistic conception of the book that he even proposed at one time to put Jaalam on the title-page as place of publication, and to have it “printed on brownish paper with those little head and tail pieces which used to adorn our earlier publications--such as hives, scrolls, urns, and the like.” This external fitness he did not secure, but he elaborated a system of notes, glossary, and index, letting the fun lurk in every part, and completed the effect by the notices of an independent press, which must have made the actual writers of book notices hesitate a little before they dropped into their customary machine-made manner when treating of this special work. The burlesque of Carlyle in one of these is especially clever. In supplying all this apparatus he drew a little on his prose papers in the _Standard_, but it is doubtful if most readers get beyond the verse, or do more than glance at the drollery which lies _perdu_ in the prose equipment, so much swifter is the flight of the arrows of satire when they are barbed with rhyme.