Valentine Hawkehurst had no vague yearnings after the fame of a Milton, no inner consciousness that he had been born to stamp out the footprints of Shakespeare on the sands of time, no unhealthy hungering after the gloomy grandeur of Byron. He had been brought up amongst people who treated literature as a trade as well as an art;—and what art is not more or less a trade? He knew the state of the market, and what kind of goods were likely to go off briskly, and it was for the market he worked. When gray shirtings were in active demand, he set his loom for gray shirtings; and when the buyers clamoured for fancy goods, he made haste to produce that class of fabrics. In this he proved himself a very low-minded and ignominious creature, no doubt; but was not one Oliver Goldsmith glad to take any order which good Mr. Newberry might give him, only writing the "Traveller" and the story of Parson Primrose pour se distraire?

Love lent wings to the young essayist's pen. It is to be feared that in roving among those shelves in Great Russell-street he showed himself something of a freebooter, taking his "bien" wherever it was to be found; but did not Molière frankly acknowledge the same practice? Mr. Hawkehurst wrote about anything and everything. His brain must needs be a gigantic storehouse of information, thought the respectful reader. He skipped from Pericles to Cromwell, from Cleopatra to Mary Stuart, from Sappho to Madame de Sablé; and he wrote of these departed spirits with such a charming impertinence, with such a delicious affectation of intimacy, that one would have thought he had sat by Cleopatra as she melted her pearls, and stood amongst the audience of Pericles when he pronounced his funeral oration. "With the De Sablé and the Chevreuse, Ninon and Marion, Maintenon and La Vallière, Anne of Austria and the great Mademoiselle of France, he seemed to have lived in daily companionship, so amply did he expatiate upon the smallest details of their existences, so tenderly did he dwell on their vanished beauties, their unforgotten graces."

The work was light and pleasant; and the monthly cheques from the proprietors of a couple of rival periodicals promised to amount to the income which the adventurer had sighed for as he trod the Yorkshire moorland. He had asked Destiny to give him Charlotte Halliday and three hundred a year, and lo! while yet the wish was new, both these blessings seemed within his grasp. It could scarcely be a matter for repining it the Fates should choose to throw in an odd fifty thousand pounds or so.

But was not all this something too much of happiness for a man whose feet had trodden in evil ways? Were not the Fates mocking this travel-stained wayfarer with bright glimpses of a paradise whose gates he was never to pass?