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Note, p.9.—Extract from Ethel Churchill.
"Nothing astonishes me more," observes L. E. L., "than the envy which attends literary fame, and the unkindly depreciation which waits upon the writer. Of every species of fame, it is the most ideal and apart; it would seem to interfere with no one. It is bought by a life of labour, generally also of seclusion and privation. Its asks its honour only from all that is most touching and elevated in humanity. What is the reward that it craves? To lighten many a solitary hour, and to spiritualize a world that were else too material. What is the requital that the Athenians of the earth give to those who have struggled through the stormy night and the dark water for their applause? Both reproach and scorn. If the author have—and why should he be exempt from?—the faults of his kind, with what greedy readiness are they seized upon and exaggerated! How ready is the sneer against his weakness or his error! What hours of feverish misery have been passed, what bitter tears have been shed, over the unjust censure and personal sarcasm!
"The imaginative feel such wrong far beyond what those of a less sensitive temperament can dream. The very essence of a poetical mind is irritable, passionate, and yet tender, susceptible, and keenly alive to that opinion which is the element of its existence. These may be faults, but faults by which themselves suffer most."—Ethel Churchill, vol. i. p. 309.
Conversational Remarks on the Literary Character.
Those who knew L. E. L. in the sweet intimacy of social life will remember, with us, that, whenever any remark chanced to strike the chord of personal feeling, she would expatiate with mournful eloquence on the trials with which a literary life is fraught for woman. "I have not courage," she observes, in one of her letters on the same subject, "to look to the future in such a case: the noble aspirations, the gifted mind, the warm heart,
