“You may be right,” said Dodson, “and yet again you may be wrong. But I must tell you, old man, that the house of Crumpett and Hawker has nothing to learn. What they think to-day, the trade thinks to-morrow. What they don’t know is not business. And you must understand that I did not rest content with the opinion of Octavius. I took it down-stairs and showed it to W. P. Walkinshaw, a highly cultivated man. And although he does sit down-stairs, he has had a large and varied experience. And as soon as I had told him what it was, he said, ‘Really, Dodson, one has no need to look. A poem in blank verse, three times the length of _Paradise Lost_--why, really, my good fellow, there is not a publishing house in this country who would take the string off the parcel.’” “No, no, no,” said the old man, beating his fingers upon the counter of the shop. “These unbelievers must not be permitted to speak in ignorance. Is it possible that the human soul can remain insensible to the nobility of its god-like power?” “Well, as it happens,” said Dodson mournfully, “I did ask Pa to be kind enough to pay particular attention to it. But as soon as Pa cast his eyes over it, he used the identical words that were used by Octavius. ‘I am afraid, Dodson,’ he said, ‘this will never do.’” “Can it be possible,” cried the old man, “the noblest achievement of the modern world to be thus discarded!” “And I didn’t stop at Octavius, and I didn’t stop at Pa,” said the mournful emissary. “I went up-stairs again to Robert Brigstock, who gives Octavius a hand with the _belles lettres_, and who is on the staff of the _Journal of Literature_. And as soon as Robert Brigstock read that accursed first page, he said, ‘May I ask, Mr. Dodson, has the writer of this an established reputation?’ ‘Oh, no,’ I had to confess, ‘he is quite a young chap who has never published anything at all.’ ‘Well, then, Mr. Dodson,’ said Robert Brigstock, who as I say is on the staff of the _Journal of Literature_, ‘no one deprecates more firmly than I do the amazing presumption that is here revealed. The writer sets out to write a treatise on human life--a somewhat timeworn theme, Mr. Dodson--which is three times the length of _Paradise Lost_’--I am telling you word for word what Robert Brigstock said--‘and he does this in a metre which Homer and Virgil would certainly not have used had they had to deal with the English language. Can anything be more presumptuous, than that an unknown writer--who surely has been to neither of our universities, or most certainly he would never have proposed to perpetrate such a gratuitous piece of effrontery--that a man who has not received a regular education should attempt that which would give pause to all the foremost of our English poets, from Chaucer to the Poet Laureate, poets, Mr. Dodson, whose reputations have long been established beyond the range of controversy?’ And if you had seen Robert Brigstock, who as a rule is the mildest and most amiable and