"Alas, that is true," cried my old friend, in a sadly modulated tone; "I am doting, eh? We, of the old school, it is we who are the wet blankets, the tedious savants. At the present day, when journalism is to literature what the piano is to music, an instrument upon which every one strums without any conviction, is it not necessary to cut matters short, and quickly create eternal /à peu près/ (pretty much the sames), little light dissertations, notices made on the spur of the moment, and superficial passion? We were in our time egotists, fervent solitaries, unreadable and unread, if you will; what does it matter? When a work had fastened on our mind, we espoused it, after a legitimate love, with all the joys of generation and paternity. We wished to endow our labour with all the qualities which it seemed able to bear, to such an extent, that it became dry, rugged, and severe. But how many were the delights not to be forgotten, in those traces followed for whole days, before our utterance of the joyous /Eureka!/--how many inward intoxications in that slow-brooding season, in that patient labour!--how many minute investigations before resolving a historic doubt! We were the exclusives of national erudition, and thought one work sufficed for one man, when he had fed it with his life, with his watchings, with his very heart, with all the tenderness of the creative workman. "I should like," he continued, "to have twenty years to ride a hobby-horse, which would make me rest at stopping-places for ten, fifteen, twenty years, on a thorny work, and offer me splendid runs, full of adventure, across the highways and secret paths of science. I would commit the follies of Doctor Faustus, to return to the age of those first bibliographic loves, which have the future brilliant and open before them--and this Glove which you disdain, my dear young friend--this Glove which you dwarf to the ideal of a doll--this Glove, I would pick it up, hold it carefully, clear off with it like a cat, and ensconce myself with it in my savant's den, to take a good long sniff at it, to study it, and to analyse it every day more and more, until at last I drew from it a serious and lasting work. "This Glove should not be thrown at the public, like one of those challenges which recall too distinctly the celebrated Glove which Charles V. sent to Westminster by a mere scullion--an accentuation of the insult offered to the King of England--it should be cast more lovingly, as in our old romances of chivalry, /the Romance of the Rose/, of /Rou/, or of /Perceforet/. If I were but twenty years old, I would do with the reader as Petrarch did with Laura, in demanding of her nothing more than the favour of picking up her Glove; and I would say to him later on, after the fashion of Marot, poetically, in offering my work:-- 'Deign to receive these Gloves with goodly cheer, My true heart's present of the coming year.'