Take my advice then, and have nothing to say to the earnest and oneness-of-purpose men. They are not only weak but wicked; and they will lead you most lamentably astray. Let us now look a little into your style, which, after all, is a matter of some importance in a serial.
On the whole, I like it. It is nervous, terse, and epigrammatic--a little too high-flown at times; but I was fully prepared for that. What I admire most, however, is your fine feeling of humanity--the instinct, as it were, and dumb life which you manage to extract from inanimate objects as well as from articulately-speaking men. Your very furniture has a kind of automatonic life; you can make an old chest of drawers wink waggishly from the corner, and a boot-jack in your hands becomes a fellow of infinite fancy. This is all very pleasant and delightful; though I think, upon the whole, you give us a little too much of it, for I cannot fancy myself quite comfortable in a room with every article of the furniture maintaining a sort of espionage upon my doings. Then as to your antiquarianism you are perfect. Your description of "the old deserted stable, with the old rusty harness hanging upon the old decayed nails, so honey-combed, as it were, by the tooth of time, that you wondered how they possibly could support the weight; while across the span of an old discoloured stirrup, a great spider had thrown his web, and now lay waiting in the middle of it, a great hairy bag of venom, for the approach of some unlucky fly, like a usurer on the watch for a spendthrift,"--that description, I say, almost brought tears to my eyes. The catalogue, also, which you give us of the decayed curry-combs all clogged with grease, the shankless besoms, the worm-eaten corn-chest, and all the other paraphernalia of the desolate stable, is as finely graphic as any thing which I ever remember to have read.
But your best scene is the opening one, in which you introduce us to the aërial dwelling of Estrella di Canterini, in Lambeth. I do not wish to flatter you, my dear fellow; but I hold it to be a perfect piece of composition, and I cannot resist the temptation of transcribing a very few sentences:--
"It was the kitten that began it, and not the cat. It isn't no use saying it was the cat, because I was there, and I saw it and know it; and if I don't know it, how should any body else be able to tell about it, if you please? So I say again it was the kitten that began it, and the way it all happened was this.