“I am not without hope of being able to make it my best,” he said, as I went back to the subject, while we turned up our heels to the sky. “At least the people who dislike my prose--and there are a great many of them, I believe--will dislike this work most” This was the first time I had heard him allude to the people who couldn’t read him,--a class which is supposed always to sit heavy upon the consciousness of the man of letters. A man organized for literature, as Mark Ambient was, must certainly have had the normal proportion of sensitiveness, of irritability; the artistic _ego_, capable in some cases of such monstrous development, must have been, in his composition, sufficiently erect and definite. I will not therefore go so far as to say that he never thought of his detractors, or that he had any illusions with regard to the number of his admirers (he could never so far have deceived himself as to believe he was popular); but I may at least affirm that adverse criticism, as I had occasion to perceive later, ruffled him visibly but little, that he had an air of thinking it quite natural he should be offensive to many minds, and that he very seldom talked about the newspapers, which, by the way, were always very stupid in regard to the author of _Beltraffio_. Of course he may have thought about them--the newspapers--night and day; the only point I wish to make is that he did n’t show it; while, at the same time, he did n’t strike one as a man who was on his guard. I may add that, as regards his hope of making the work on which he was then engaged the best of his books, it was only partly carried out. That place belongs, incontestably, to _Beltraffio_, in spite of the beauty of certain parts of its successor. I am pretty sure, however, that he had, at the moment of which I speak, no sense of failure; he was in love with his idea, which was indeed magnificent, and though for him, as, I suppose, for every artist, the act of execution had in it as much torment as joy, he saw his work growing a little every day and filling-out the largest plan he had yet conceived. “I want to be truer than I have ever been,” he said, settling himself on his back, with his hands clasped behind his head; “I want to give an impression of life itself. No, you may say what you will, I have always arranged things too much, always smoothed them down and rounded them off and tucked them in,--done everything to them that life does n’t do. I have been a slave to the old superstitions.” “You a slave, my dear Mark Ambient? You have the freest imagination of our day!”