After the publication of "Red Pottage" a storm burst respecting one of the characters--Mr. Gresley--which even now I have not forgotten. The personal note was struck once more with vigour, but this time by the clerical arm. I was denounced by name from a London pulpit. A Church newspaper which shall be nameless suggested that my portrait of Mr. Gresley was merely a piece of spite on my part, as I had probably been jilted by a clergyman. I will not pretend that the turmoil gave me unmixed pain. If it had, I should have been without literary vanity. But when a witty bishop wrote to me that he had enjoined on his clergy the study of Mr. Gresley as a Lenten penance, it was not possible for me to remain permanently depressed. The character was the outcome of long, close observation of large numbers of clergymen, but not of one particular parson. Why, then, was it so exactly like individual clergymen that I received excited or enthusiastic letters from the parishioners of I dare not say how many parishes, affirming that their vicar (whom I had never beheld), and he alone, could have been the prototype of Mr. Gresley? I was frequently implored to go down and "see for myself." Their most adorable platitudes were chronicled and sent up to me, till I wrung my hands because it was too late to insert them in "Red Pottage."[1] For they all fitted Mr. Gresley like a glove, and I should certainly have used them if it had been possible. For, as has been well said, "There is no copyright in platitudes." They are part of our goodly heritage. And though people like Mr. Gresley and my academic prig Wentworth have in one sense made a particular field of platitude their own, by exercising themselves continually upon it, nevertheless we cannot allow them to warn us off as trespassers, or permit them to annex or enclose common land, the property and birthright of the race. Young men fresh from public schools also informed me that Mr. Gresley was the facsimile of their tutor, and of no one else. I was at that time unacquainted with any schoolmasters, being cut off from social advantages. But that fact did me no good. The dispassionate statement of it had no more effect on my young friends than my father's denial had on my elderly relations.