THE CHRONICLE OF CLEMENDY
ant material profit: on the contrary, mental and material miseries without end are the inevitable reward of the lettered man. Whatever pretences may be on the lips of the general, in their hearts they despise such an one unless he be extremely wealthy; an engineer's apprentice or a young draper's assistant is held in more honour than he. Yet, there is no denying the existence of this literary impulse; it is impossible to overlook its amazing strength and persistence in the face of every discouragement: poverty and hunger, sneers and jeers without; capital sentences of judgement within—and yet the man of letters, though he die daily, yet lives and renews his endeavour. And so in 1885, in that dim and leafy and languid Clarendon Road, as I munched my dry bread and drank my tea and smoked my frequent pipe, it came upon me that a book was to be written. And here I stay for a moment. For it has just been borne in on me as I write that I have rewritten, in other terms, the "Epistle Dedicatory" to "The Chronicle of Clemendy," which I wrote thirty-eight years ago in languid Clarendon Road. Thus, in the "Epistle Dedicatory," in the grand manner:
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