have discontinued writing them, but they forced themselves from me." Warren says that the first chapter of the Diary of a Late Physician--the Early Struggles,--was offered by him successively to the conductors of three leading London magazines, and rejected, as "unsuitable for their pages," and "not likely to interest the public." Scott tells us that one of his nearest friends predicted the failure of Waverley. Herder, one of the most comprehensive thinkers and versatile authors of Germany, adjured Goethe not to take so unpromising a subject as Faust. Hume tried to dissuade Robertson from writing the History of Charles V. Montesquieu, upon the completion of The Spirit of Laws, which had cost him twenty years of labor, and which ran through twenty-two editions in less than as many months after its publication, submitted the manuscript to Helvetius and Saurin, who returned it with the advice not to spoil a great reputation by publishing it. Wordsworth told Robinson that before his ballads were published, Tobin implored him to leave out We are Seven, as a poem that would damn the book. It turned out to be one of the most popular. That charming and once popular Scottish story, The Annals of the Parish, by John Galt, was written ten or twelve years before the date of its publication, and anterior to the appearance of Waverley and Guy Mannering, and was rejected by the publishers of those works, with the assurance that a novel or work of fiction entirely Scottish would not take with the public. St. Pierre submitted his delightful tale, Paul and Virginia, to the criticisms of a circle of his learned friends. They told him that it was a failure; that to publish it would be a piece of foolishness; that nobody would read it. St. Pierre appealed from his learned critics to his unlearned but sympathetic and sensible housekeeper. He read--she listened, admired, and wept. He accepted her verdict, and will be remembered by one little story longer than his contemporaries by their weary tomes. Moliere made use of a person of the same class to criticise his plays. "I remember," says Boileau, "his pointing out to me several times an old servant that he had, to whom he told me he sometimes read his comedies, and he assured me that when the humorous passages did not strike her, he altered them, because he had frequently proved that such passages did not take upon the stage."