This piece-meal publication, whether in part or periodical, could not be without some effects on the character of the production. These were neither wholly good nor wholly bad. They served to some extent to correct the tendency, mentioned above, of the three-volume novel to "go to seed" in the middle--to become a sort of preposterous sandwich with meat on the outsides and a great slab of ill-baked and insipid bread between. For readers would not have stood this in instalments: you had to provide some bite or promise of bite in each--if possible--indeed to leave each off at an interesting point. But this itself rather tended to a jumpy and ill-composed whole--to that mechanical shift from one part of the plot to another which is so evident, for instance, in Trollope: and there was worse temptation behind. If a man had the opportunity, the means, the courage, and the artistic conscience necessary to finish his work before any part of it appeared, or at least to scaffold it thoroughly throughout in advance, no harm was done. But perhaps there is no class of people with whom the temptation--common enough in every class--of hand-to-mouth work is more fatal than with men of letters. It is said that even the clergy are human enough to put off their sermon-writing till Saturday, and what can be expected of the profane man, especially when he has a whole month apparently before him? It is pretty certain that Thackeray succumbed to this temptation: and so did a great many people who could much less afford to do so than Thackeray. It was almost certainly responsible for part of the astonishing medley of repetitions and lapses in Lever: and I am by no means sure that some of Dickens's worst faults, especially the ostentatious plot-that-is-no-plot of such a book as _Little Dorrit_--the plot which marks time with elaborate gesticulation and really does not advance at all--were not largely due to the system. Let it only be added that these expensive forms of publication by no means excluded cheap reprints as soon as a book was really popular. The very big people kept up their prices: but everybody else was glad to get into "popular libraries," yellow-backed railway issues, and the like, as soon as possible.