Yet here again, I am afraid, the fool is answered according to his folly. It is, when you think of it, a rather dreadful fate to become a classic. Once the writer is thus deified, his private character is the first burnt offering. He has well hidden himself beneath the effigy he found diverting; he rests thereunder, untroubled: but about his tomb frisk commentators obviously raised, by a superior education, from that troglodytic race which enlivens the public privies with verse. For his cult has need of a legend, and prefers a highly colored epopee of lechery and sexual curiosa, such as affords vicarious outlet to those desires which we imprison fearfully in ourselves, and reveals the demigod to be no better than anybody else. So Mary Fitton and Georgina Hogarth and Mrs. Brookfield are dragged into the saga: stout volumes are devoted to proving that Wordsworth begot a bastard, or that Byron was caught in incest with his sister; nobody appears able to write about Molière without suggesting that his wife was also very probably his daughter: and all our literary gossip becomes a whispered and sniggered ritual of phallic worship. Nor do many of the auctorially great escape calumny in the form of a Complete Edition, wherein their self-confessed failures at writing, and the chips and rubbish of the workshop, and the rough draughts and notes designed for the waste-basket, and the politic ephemeræ into which most writers are allured by kindness and advertising purposes, are piddlingly amassed to be bound up, in pompous scavengery, with all the unsigned refuse from the back files of magazines which can be "attributed" to the victim. None other of the dead has even his appointed executors combined to convict him of idiocy. And of course those less put-upon immortals who are recollected, however infrequently, by virtue of one book alone are but too apt to get into some such collection as Everyman's Library, and have the upshot of their existence identified with the twaddle and smug tediums of Trollope and Jane Austen and Mary Cowden Clarke.