To me that seemed a secondary consideration. Yet that was, I took it, the main tenet of the Economists and of the creed which John Charteris had elsewhere expounded. Kings and prime ministers and admirals and czars and popes and bank-presidents all shrivelled with the passing of time, as I had said earlier, into some uncarnate quality, uncertainly remembered. But writers here and there did attain to a sort of terrestrial immortality as rounded, actual human beings. The lyric poet bequeaths to us like a legacy his personal emotion, the familiar essayist makes the gossamer of his whims and fancies perdurable as diamonds. The great egotists, in particular, such as Pepys, Casanova, Montaigne, Cellini, Rousseau, are generally conceded each to have immortalized himself and all his traits, especially his frailties: for each lounges into our libraries unreticently, proclaiming, in the words of Montaigne, "I expose myself entire"; and each too has, by lending to every peccadillo permanency, kept letters healthily lewd, with the lustiness of eternal youth.... Well! that, with just one reservation, which I thought not unimportant, seemed true enough. For the great egotists do achieve very charming and tolerably permanent results, in a fashion that I could best appraise, I believed, by pausing here to consider the triumphant outcome, in our own era, of the literary endeavors of Mr. George Moore. § 81 No reasonably conceited author, I said,--if for the moment one might imagine any of the tribe to merit the adverb,--would aspire to be perpetuated in a form more worthy than, in the Carra Edition, had lately been bestowed upon the Collected Works of George Moore. It was true that I spoke with, of the promised twenty volumes, only fourteen at hand: but these I had found in every nicety of book-making to be wholly admirable. Paper and binding and printing were of the sort describable as luxurious. The frontispieces most handsomely presented George Moore in every imaginable phase of moustache and mental abstraction. In fine, it was the sort of Collected Edition which any victim of the ennervating habit of writing books could not but view a little wistfully. And, though for a while I had thought to lay finger upon one marked, consolatory defect,--that the lack of running-heads to the pages creates some difficulty in locating at once the especial subdivision of the volume for which you happen to be looking,--yet reflection had made against such petty fault-finding, by revealing that, after all, it was as remunerative to read in one place as another, in this longish book which is devoted, after all, entirely to one topic.