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But it is rather the tradition of Trollope that rules to-day–Trollope, that canny craftsman who wrote every day for a stated number of hours, and who, if he finished a novel twenty minutes before the end of his term, would take up a clean sheet of paper and commence another. Did I say the canny Trollope? Nay, this is rather uncanny, unearthly, unhuman. What! You have lived with your characters day and night for months and months, have thought their thoughts and been racked by their passions, and you can calmly wind up their affairs and turn instanter to a new circle of acquaintances? ‘T is the very coquetry of composition, the heartless flirtation of fiction-mongering. Thackeray, indeed, confesses to liking to begin another piece of work after one piece is out of hand, were it only to write half a dozen lines; but “that is something towards Number the Next,” not towards Book the Next, for these old giants wrote from hand to mouth. I have always figured to myself Trollope’s novels as all written on a long endless scroll of paper rolled on an iron axis, nailed up in his study. The publishers approach to buy so many yards of fiction, and shopman Anthony, scissors in hand, unrolls the scroll and snips it off at the desired point. This counter-jumping conception of the Muses prevails with the customers to-day, with the editors who buy fiction at so much a thousand words. Carlyle–Heaven preserve me from finishing a book as he did his “French Revolution,” to lose it and write it all over again!–had the truer idea when he suggested that authors should be paid by what they do not write. But it was reserved for the libraries to reach the lowest conception of literature. Their clients enjoy the privilege of having so many books at a time, a book being a book just as an orange is an orange. If the book the reader wants is not there, why, there is another book for him to take; by which beautiful system the good writer reaps very little advantage over the mediocre, for indifferent books are forced upon the public as the conjuror forces cards on people who think they are choosing them. It is a wonder the libraries do not purvey their literature by the pound.