THE COUNTRY LIFE. 215 



nothing, and its manners, of which he was com- 

 pletely ignorant ; thirdly, after many years of 

 blundering along the wrong road, he advanced 

 to the perception of the great truth that he who 

 would succeed in the great profession of letters 

 must absolutely write on some subject that he 

 knows, and that he should understand his own 

 limitations. For instance, Jefferies, as we 

 have seen, ardently desired to become a 

 novelist. If a man be habitually observant 

 of his fellow -men, if he have the eye of a 

 humourist, a brain which is like a store-house 

 for capacity, a fair measure of the dramatic 

 faculty, an instinctive power of selection, and 

 the faculty of getting away from his own in- 

 dividuality altogether, he will perhaps do well 

 to try the profession of a novelist. But Jefferies 

 possessed one only of these faculties : he had 

 a brain which would hold millions of facts, each 

 consigned to its proper place : but he had little 

 or no humour : he had no power of creating 

 situation and incident : and he could never 

 possibly get outside himself and away from 

 his own people. He could not, therefore, 

 become a novelist : that line of work though 



