- gust 28th, 1886, we find a tribute to the perfection
of her "copy:"—
"The printers report that, owing to the fewness of
the corrections and the clearness with which they
are made, revises will be unnecessary, which will
be a great gain in time, as well as a saving of expense."
Vice versâ, one calls to mind a tale of Miss Martineau's
about Carlyle, who literally smothered his
proof-sheets with corrections. One day he went to
the office to urge on the printer. "Why, sir," said
the latter, "you really are so very hard upon us with
your corrections. They take so much time, you
see!" Carlyle replied that he had been accustomed
to this sort of thing—he had got works printed in
Scotland, and "Yes, indeed, sir," rejoined the
printer, "we are aware of that. We have a man
here from Edinburgh, and when he took up a bit of
your copy, he dropped it as if it had burnt his fingers,
and cried out, 'Lord, have mercy! have you
got that man to print for? Lord knows when we
shall get done with his corrections.'"
It is evident that Mr. Bentley deemed his protégée—if we may so term her—capable of turning her pen in many directions. "I am not sure that you could not give us a fine historical novel," he wrote in 1887, "if you got hold of a character which fascinated your imagination."
