What the reviewers had said did not, especially and eventually, matter. They were, in fact, to-day united in their abuse nowhere except in my scrapbooks: I alone had--now for some twenty years, and rather charitably, I thought,--been at pains to preserve their utterances. Otherwise, all of yesterday's Olympians had loosed their thunderbolts and had passed sonorously; and each demolishing of me was to-day as little remembered as was any other of that year's thunderstorms. To-day--if with a lessened frequency, from even loftier altitudes,--still now and then descended peltingly the onslaughts of young godlings. Yet to-day I still clung, somehow, to the belief that my intelligence and morals were not so markedly below the average as I was constantly assured. And, in the manner of those elder tempests, so likewise, I knew, must pass away the reverberant condescensions of the young, who were condemned as yet to appraise my book, and all books, in the light of their contrast with that masterpiece which youth is immemorially about to dash off on some vacant Saturday afternoon. For presently these godlings too would turn from the serious work of reviewing creative literature to the diversion of writing it.... And whatever any other formally empowered or free-lance commentator might futurely say, whether in print or conversation, about my stupidity and crass plagiarisms and self-conceit and futile pruriencies, would not, I knew, matter either, in itself. The one trouble was that all this maintained a clouded and sulphuric atmosphere in which I dubiously moved, so far as went the thoughts of so many dear, dull persons.... Meanwhile I had got the hearing which throughout eighteen years of unreason I had hoped to get, and had always believed to be imminent; and the book which I had written, in the Biography, was finished, more or less, and would for its allotted season remain. With the length, or, if you will, with the extreme brevity of that season, I had no concern: it was enough to know that the Biography was finished, and would outlast me. § 99