And some three months afterwards, at the end of the year 1854, my first book--but my second novel--was launched into the reading world, and I have hardly got over the feeling yet that I had actually a right to dub myself a novelist!
When the first three notices of the book appeared, wild dreams of a brilliant future beset me. They were all favourable notices--too favourable; but _John Bull_, _The Press_, and _Bell's Messenger_ (I think they were the papers) scattered favourable notices indiscriminately at that time. Presently the _Athenæum_ sobered me a little, but wound up with a kindly pat on the back, and the _Saturday Review_, then in its seventh number, drenched me with vitriolic acid, and brought me to a lower level altogether; and, finally, the _Morning Herald_ blew a loud blast to my praise and glory--that last notice, I believe, having been written by my old friend Sir Edward Clarke, then a very young reviewer on the _Herald_ staff, with no dreams of becoming Her Majesty's Solicitor-General just then! 'The House of Elmore' actually paid its publishers' expenses, and left a balance, and brought me in a little cheque; and thus my writing life began in sober earnest.
[Illustration: drawing by Geo. Hutchinson
I think that it was in an article by a fellow-scribe, where, doubtless more in sorrow than in anger, that gentleman exposed the worthlessness of the productions of sundry of his brother authors, in which I read that whatever success I had met with as a writer of fiction was due to my literary friends and 'nepotic criticism.' This is scarcely the case, since when I began to write I do not think that I knew a single creature who had published books--blue books alone excepted. Nobody was ever more outside the ring, or less acquainted with the art of 'rolling logs,' than the humble individual who pens these lines. But the reader shall judge for himself.