“I pay my way; when I was with you before, I never owed you money; you find me now not owing my publisher money, but my publisher in debt to me; I never owe so much as a tailor’s bill; beyond secured debts, I do not owe £5 in the world and never have” (which is quite true). “I get my summer’s holiday in Italy every year; I live very quietly and cheaply, but it suits my health and tastes, and I have no acquaintances but those I value. My friends stick by me. If I was to get in with these literary and scientific people I should hate them and they me. I should fritter away my time and my freedom without getting a _quid pro quo_: as it is, I am free and I give the swells every now and then such a facer as they get from no one else. Of course I don’t expect to get on in a commercial sense at present, I do not go the right way to work for this; but I am going the right way to secure a lasting reputation and this is what I do care for. A man cannot have both, he must make up his mind which he means going in for. I have gone in for posthumous fame and I see no step in my literary career which I do not think calculated to promote my being held in esteem when the heat of passion has subsided.” Trübner shrugged his shoulders. He plainly does not believe that I shall succeed in getting a hearing; he thinks the combination of the religious and cultured world too strong for me to stand against. If he means that the reviewers will burke me as far as they can, no doubt he is right; but when I am dead there will be other reviewers and I have already done enough to secure that they shall from time to time look me up. They won’t bore me then but they will be just like the present ones. [1882.] Capping a Success When I had written _Erewhon_ people wanted me at once to set to work and write another book like it. How could I? I cannot think how I escaped plunging into writing some laboured stupid book. I am very glad I did escape. Nothing is so cruel as to try and force a man beyond his natural pace. If he has got more stuff in him it will come out in its own time and its own way: if he has not—let the poor wretch alone; to have done one decent book should be enough; the very worst way to get another out of him is to press him. The more promise a young writer has given, the more his friends should urge him not to over-tax himself. A Lady Critic A lady, whom I meet frequently in the British Museum reading-room and elsewhere, said to me the other day: “Why don’t you write another _Erewhon_?” “Why, my dear lady,” I replied, “_Life and Habit_ was another _Erewhon_.” They say these things to me continually to plague me and make out that I could do one good book but never any more. She is the sort of person who if she had known Shakespeare would have said to him, when he wrote _Henry the IVth_: “Ah, Mr. Shakespeare, why don’t you write us another _Titus Andronicus_? Now that was a sweet play, that was.”