bitterness of disappointment and the joy of success occurred to him, years ago, when he rejected, in a most polite note, an exquisite story which I intended for Household Words. Ah, that was a story now! The editor evidently thought so. A literary friend of mine suggested that there was jealousy in C. D.'s rejection of it. "Two stars in one hemisphere, you know!" I did not quite feel at the time that he was joking me, for I had a most transcendant opinion of that story of "The Hunchback Pedlar." It was sufficient for my pride that a courteous explanation of its "not being suitable to our pages" accompanied the rejected MS. ; but I soon learnt not to be downhearted, even in the absence of such polite attention. I tried the “Hunchback" elsewhere, and lost him; he fell into less considerate hands than those of the Household Words editor, and was added to some other lost papers which might so easily be made available in these days of Flamers and Flummeries. Those learned doctors of literature who rejected the "Hunchback" may have been wise in their generation, but they might have sent the deformed child back to its proud and indulgent parent. What a cunning, clever, wily, hawk-eyed hunchback it was ! I remember him now defying authority, sneaking and grinning like Quilp, yelling and terrifying everybody, as if he belonged to Victor Hugo's story. He was a strange mixture of Quilp and Asmodeo, of the Old Man of the Sea and a dwarf whom I had seen in a show, and whose hand I had been permitted to shake as it hung out of a dog-kennel sort of house of three stories, which the showman carried in his arms. But I loved him, nevertheless; for was he not mine own? Had I not created him, and did I not plan out that career which at last left him great and happy, and noble and honoured, despite his hump and his twisted legs?

I can readily understand now, why the editor of the Illustrated London News and his wise brother of Notes and Queries rejected that elaborate treatise from a youthful hand upon "Rural Sports and Pastimes;" but I wish I had kept copies of those carefully prepared treatises. There was a real experience in that story of the Mummers and the Plough Monday Festival. The speeches of St. George and the fiery Hector had not been gleaned from books. The language had come down to a long generation of boys; and the drolleries of "Moll" anent ploughs and ploughmen were local witticisms in rhyme which were curious enough for preservation. Do I think so now? Most certainly; for are not those curious documents lost to me for ever? How well I remember sealing that big envelope with glowing red wax, and wondering whether the illustrated paper

would reproduce my rough etching of the scene where the doctor pours something "out of this bottle" into Hector's throat, and bids him "rise and fight again," whilst St. George boasts—

"It was I who brought the fiery dragon to the slaughter,

And by those means I won the king of Egypt's daughter."

For many weeks I secretly scanned the pages of the pictorial paper, and at last learnt to despise it and think lightly of Notes and Queries too.

The poet's corner of the little local paper was beneath my ambition. I had written humorous and learned paragraphs and romantic things about spring flowers long before the magazines and great London weeklies tempted me to burn the midnight oil and stock the shelves of oblivion. But long before this I remember me of a copybook filled with the veracious account of a runaway youth, who left Boston as a cabin-boy. The writer was only twelve years old, and his inspiration was from "Robinson Crusoe," the "Arabian Nights," and a bundle of quaint old ballads bought at three yards a penny in a market town. That copy-book was illustrated after the manner of a certain cheap "Dick Turpin." The artist had done his work with pen and ink, and his colours were red, and blue, and black. The path of the sailor boy's life, owing to the artist's large stock of red ink, was sanguinary in the extreme. Talk of the sensation novels of middleaged ladies in the present day, you should have seen that copy-book of the young story-teller who illustrated his own MS. What has become of that well-remembered work? It could hardly be indicative of genius; for even now the charm of boyhood cannot disguise from my memory a knowledge of the utterly stupid and idiotic character of that first story. And yet in itself it was nearly as good as an early drawing of Turner's which I saw at Clifton some years ago. Canova and Wilkie, Ferguson and Newton, Scott and Canning, gave early evidence of the power that was in them; but Turner certainly did not. And many other great men have written stories quite as absurd, and drawn pictures quite as idiotic, as those in my lost copybook.

Under my eye, whilst I am writing, there lies a copy of the first volume of The Eton Miscellany, published in 1827. I dare say many of the writers in that periodical would be rejoiced if certain papers printed therein were as utterly lost as my illustrated copy-book. Amongst the contributors to this magazine were the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, M.P., who was then in his eighteenth year; A. H. Hallam, son of Hallam the historian, and the very youth whose death Tennyson has mourned

in his immortal "In Memoriam;" Sir James William Colville; and various other men who have made a stir in the world's history. I am sure Colville and Gladstone, and Selwyn, the Bishop of New Zealand, will forgive me for saying that any regular magazine editor, in the present or the past, would have rejected the whole of those contributions which they contemplated with such pride when they formed the irresponsible writing staff of The Eton Miscellany. Here and there we may perhaps discover a scintillation of the peculiar genius of the writers; but, take Gladstone's work for example, it bears no evidence of the embryo power which was to develop in the future. He was the first editor of the Miscellany, and his opening address smacks of an early attraction towards the field of politics. Some of my readers might regard a head-line in his second introductory address as almost prophetic :

NEW MEMBERS OF THE CABINET."

"Though," he says, "my superscription is alarmingly political, I can assure my readers that the contagion has extended no further. I love, like some other people, to give to my proceedings an air of importance; and those whom I shall now mention are simply companions whom I have admitted into my cabinet, to aid me in conducting those weighty affairs in which I have been, am, and hope to continue, engaged."

Mr. Gladstone's prose throughout is weak, affected, and schoolboyish, interlarded with much Latin; his poetry sometimes rises to a high order of merit ; but you fail to trace the slightest glimpse of that financial acumen, and those brilliant political powers of oratory which shone with such conspicuous radiance when he may be said to have annihilated the Derby ministry in 1852 by his criticism of the Disraeli budget. Although he was editor of the Eton Miscellany in 1827, it was really not until 1840 that he made any impression as a writer, and then in an entirely different walk to that which he selected in his eighteenth year at Eton. Has Disraeli ever lost any papers, I wonder? He has lost no time, that is certain; and the profession of letters was ennobled when he stood forward and addressed the House of Commons as Premier of England.

How the Times must regret having rejected that enthusiastic paper of mine on the present Premier, when I took for my text the young politician's memorable declaration to Lord Melbourne, and predicted that Benjamin Disraeli would one day be at the head of an administration. It would surely have been pleasant for the editor to have

reproduced the prophetic paragraph at the present time. But the Thunderer did not know me in those past days, and now-you remember that leading article about which there was such a profound sensation last year. . . . Ah, well, let it pass; my theme is lost papers, not published articles; defeats, not victories. There is Fraser now one of the most poetical and delicious early essays that ever rippled from sharp-nibbed pen upon cream-laid letter paper, has been lying unheeded in that obfuscated editor's room for ten years and more. If I had it now, I could afford to invite the editor to a banquet out of the proceeds of the cheque which would come to me, fresh and pleasant to look upon, in acknowledgment of that neglected paper. It was a sort of rural reverie on an old flint gun which had seen service in a civil war, and had done duty in the old times when shooting partridges was combined with the sport of hunting them. A rambling, chatty essay, if I remember correctly, with half a dozen incisive anecdotes in it, and a smack of olden sport; it was rejected, it is lost; and the world is none the worse, perhaps, and certainly none the better, for somebody's want of appreciation.

Artaxes, my friend, you remember that little fairy tale of the northern brooks? Your friend, the editor of The Great Shilling'sworth, he would have published it had his assistant not let it go by mistake to the butter-woman. Ah, I have many pleasant recollections in connection with that story. In the Durham colliery districts white, shiney, sparkling streams are sometimes suddenly changed to black, inky torrents. An instance of this kind occured near the Wear, in a romantic spot not far from ancient Dunelm. There were two mountain streams tumbling over the same line of country. I made them lovers. There was a rival, a certain imp of Phlegethon, and in the night time Pluto's minion seized the fair goddess of the northern river. This was the foundation of the first part of my story. The second part described the grief of the lonely brook of the mountain, and his dream of vengeance. There was a great gathering of the waters of the upper world. The north country people said it was a flood. There had been wet in the hills, and the Wear overflowed. How should they know of the love that had existed between those two brooks, and the feud which had sprung up between the great rivers of earth and hell? What did these poor miners whose dwellings were flooded know about Ceres, and Proserpine, and Pluto, and the nymph Arethusa? When the flood subsided, and the blackened stream was once more pure, the people said the pumpng had been abandoned, and the pit was not to be worked; but the

truth was, the river gods of the north had triumphed over the four rivers of Hades, and the brook lovers were restored to each other pure and beautiful as the valley in which they finally came together in matrimonial embrace, and went on to the great ocean. You remember, Artaxes, how I worked all this out, and what a pleasant evening we had when I read it after supper to Miss Perrywood and yourself. It is a lost paper now, mon ami; and if I saw it again, perhaps my strongest remembrance about it would be the fairy-like music which Miss Perrywood played as an interlude between the first and second parts of the story. I think I should have proposed to that girl, Artaxes, if my northern visit had extended over another week. But she had too much money. I don't think I could ever offer myself to a rich woman, Artaxes. In the first place, if she refused me, I should think she believed me to be a mercenary adventurer in love with her purse; if she accepted me, I should be afraid she would try to be master. I would sooner Miss Perrywood had made curl-papers of my manuscript than have it going about the world with dabs of butter grease in the middle of every sheet. She is Mrs. Corlton Wiffins now, and you may see her with four fat children in a yellow brougham at Hyde-park Corner, every day at four in the season. When she reads this paper she will laugh to think how silly we all were in that northern house, talking about fairies and music. Ah, well, there is a "silly season" of life which is as interesting and as delusive as the productions of the "silly season" in literature. I would sooner live in that silly season all my days than be the master of that yellow brougham; and I would sooner be compelled to read all the "silly season "literature than wade through that sea of parliamentary debate which floods the daily papers all through the London summer.

How many men who might have held a high place in the world of letters have been lost with their lost papers! The patience required to go on, and fight on in face of the difficulties which beset the path of the literary labourer in his early days, must be immense. Charles Dickens said the other day that he had heard much of dragons in the way; but his experience was in favour of regarding them as myths. The career of the author of "Pickwick" is an exceptional one. There was no dragon in his way that his lance could not conquer; but the lost papers which lie about in publishers' offices, in editors' rooms, in theatrical managers' chests, would reveal strange stories of the voracious dragons which beset the highway of literature, nevertheless. An author of a very aphoristic turn of mind suggests that if, like the lost things pictured in the allegoric scene of