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that Heaven has denied me: one can't expect everything here below. Their artificial simplicity, their clumsiness, their heaviness, their dreary counterfeit of a kind of common humour, their laborious strivings for a kind of shoddy pathos, their ignorance, their vulgarity, their pretentiousness, and withal their unmitigated insipidity—these are the qualities, no doubt, that make them popular with the middle classes, that endear them to the Great Heart of the People, but they are too much for the likes o' me. I don't mind vulgarity when I can get it with a dash of spice, as in the writings of Mr. Ally Sloper, or with a swagger, as in the writings of Mr. Frank Harris. I don't mind insipidity when I can get it with a touch of cosmopolitan culture, as in the writings of Mr. Karl Bædeker. But vulgarity and insipidity mingled, as in the writings of Mr. Hall Caine, are more than my weak flesh can bear. On the title-page of The Manxman Mr. Caine prints this modest motto: "What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" On page 6 he observes: "In spite of everything he loved her. That was where the bitterness of the evil lay." On page 7, "A man cannot fight against himself for long. That deadly enemy is certain to slay." On page 11, "His first memory of Philip was of sleeping with him, snuggled up by his side in the dark, hushed and still in a narrow bed with iron ends to it, and of leaping up in the morning and laughing." And then, on page 41, "The moon had come up in her whiteness behind, and all was quiet and solemn around." Note the subtle perceptions, the profound insight, the dainty verbiage, the fresh images, the musical rhythm of these excerpts. "That was where the bitterness of the evil lay." "A man cannot fight against himself!" "The moon had come up in her whiteness beyind!" . . . . Faugh, sir, the gentleman writes with his mouth full. Let us haste to an apothecary's, and buy an

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