These remarks may serve to suggest the temptations which most beset the author in our days, though peculiar to our day only in the degree in which authorship has become more professional. For the ideal author is the man who, having discovered truth, desires to reveal it to his fellows, or, being full of perceptions of beauty, cannot resist the impulse to embody them in words or outward symbols. But when he desires also to live by his powers, he is at once in a position of which all authors know the peril. He becomes self-conscious; for he has a perpetual poultice of public favour or enmity applied to soften his fibres, and to make him feel, even in his study, that an eye is upon him and that he must so act as always to preserve attention. He is tempted to produce sensation at any cost--to shock and startle by horrors if he cannot move the sympathies by gentle arts: for a man who cannot command the pathetic, can, at least, always be disgusting. He can turn our stomachs if he cannot move our hearts. He is tempted, at least, to caricature--to show how keen is his perception by crude and glaring colours, and to indulge in the grotesque as an easy substitute for the really graphic; he can affect a facile cynicism to show how profound is his penetration, and display that marvellous knowledge of the world and the human heart, and that power of discovering the emptiness of all apparent virtues which is so common an endowment of young gentlemen upon their first initiation into real experience of life. There is nothing which the author affects so easily at his first start as the world weariness which comes from long experience and years of disappointed hope. And when a man has once gained applause for his sentiment, he finds himself his own covert rival, and is forced to substitute for the first "sprightly runnings" a fanciful pumping up of the last dregs of his old feelings. Nothing, unfortunately, is more common, or could be more easily illustrated by examples of good writers, than the spectacle of the veteran trying to reproduce in cold blood the effects which he struck out spontaneously and unconsciously in youth. And, then, at every instant the poor author feels that he must keep up with the fashion; he lives in fear of that verdict which will come some day, that he is an old fogey, and that he is transgressing those eternal principles which were discovered by some ingenuous youth a fortnight ago.