The rapidly-working _littérateur_ is another sphinx worth studying as a curiosity--we might say, indeed, a living miracle. There he stands, a jovial, self-indulgent, enjoying man, out in society every night in the week; by no means abstinent from champagne, and as little given to early rising as he is to consumption of the midnight oil. But he gets through a mass of work which would be respectable in a mere copyist, and which is little less than miraculous in an original producer. How he thinks, when he finds time to make up his plots, to work out his characters, even to correct his proofs, are riddles unanswerable by all his friends. Taking the mere mechanical act alone, he must write faster than any living man has ever been known to write, to get through all that goes under his name. And when is it done? Literary sphinxes of this kind go about unchallenged; indeed, they are very much about, and to be beheld everywhere; and one looks at them with respect, not knowing of what material they are made, nor of what mysterious gifts they are the possessors. Novels, plays, essays, poems, come pouring forth in never slackening supply. The railway stations and all hoardings are made gorgeous by the announcement of their feats set out in red and blue and yellow. No sooner has one blaze of triumph burnt itself out than another blaze of triumph flares up; and nothing but death or a rich inheritance seems likely to stop their mysterious fecundity. How is it done? That is the secret of the literary sphinx, to which the admiring and amazed brotherhood is anxiously seeking some clue; but up to the present hour it has been kept jealously guarded and no solution has been arrived at. There is another form of the literary sphinx in the Nobodies and Anons who speak from out the darkness and let no man see whence the voice proceeds. They are generally tracked to their lair sooner or later, and the sphinx's head turns out to be only a pasteboard mask behind which some well-known Apuleian hid himself for a while, working much amazement among the wondering crowd while the clasps held good, but losing something of that fervid worship when the reality became known. Others, again, of these Anons have, like Junius, kept their true abode hidden and their name a mystery still, though there be some who swear they have traced the footsteps and know exactly where the sphinx lives, and what is the name upon his frontlet, and of what race and complexion he is without his mask. It may be so. But as every discoverer has a track of his own, and as each swears that his sphinx is the real one and no other, the choice among so many becomes a service of difficulty; and perhaps the wisest thing to do is to suspend judgment until the literary sphinx of the day chooses to reveal himself by the prosaic means of a title-page, with his name as author printed thereon and his place of abode jotted down at the foot of the preface. _FLIRTING._