I think this amiable lady may be consoled for the slight which _Men of the Time_ puts upon her. It seems plain that she is a very great personage indeed to all the girls of the time. But if you ask me how such a subterranean reputation as this is formed, what starts it, how it is supported, I can only say I have failed, after some not unindustrious search, to discover. I may but conjecture that, as I have suggested, the public instinctively feels the attraction of the article that satisfies its passing requirement. These illiterate successes--if I may use the word "illiterate" in its plain meaning and without offence--are exceedingly ephemeral, and sink into the ground as silently and rapidly as they rose from it. What has become of Mrs. Gore and Mrs. March? Who wrote _Emilia Wyndham_, and to what elegant pen did the girls who are now grandmothers owe _Ellen Middleton_? Alas! it has taken only forty years to strew the poppy of oblivion over these once thrilling titles. For we have to face the fact that reputations are lost as well as won. What destroys the fame of an accepted author? This, surely, is a question not less interesting than that with which we started, and a necessary corollary to it. Not unfavourable reviews, certainly. An unjust review may annoy and depress the author, it may cheer a certain number of his enemies and cool the ardour of a few of his friends, but in the long run it is sure to be innocuous in proportion to its injustice. I have in my mind the mode in which Mr. Browning's poems were treated in certain quarters twenty years ago. I remember more than one instance in which critics were permitted, in newspapers which ought to have known better, to exemplify that charge of needless obscurity which it was then the fashion to bring against the poet, by the quotation of mutilated fragments, and even by the introduction of absurd mistakes into the transcription of the text. Now, in this case, a few persons were possibly deterred from the further perusal of a writer who appeared, by these excerpts, to be a lunatic; but I think far more were roused into vehement sympathy for Mr. Browning by comparing the quotations with the originals, and so finding out that the reviewers had lied.