It is as if he were describing the mansions in which he himself has formerly lodged, though for a short time.

Hence in great writers of History--of Romance--of the Drama--the _gusto_ with which they paint their personages; their creations are flesh and blood, not shadows or machines.
Maltravers was at first, then, an egotist, in the matter of his rude and desultory sketches--in the manner, as I said before, he was careless and negligent, as men will be who have not yet found that expression is an art.

Still those wild and valueless essays--those rapt and secret confessions of his own heart--were a delight to him.

He began to taste the transport, the intoxication of an author.

And, oh, what a luxury is there in that first love of the Muse! that process by which we give palpable form to the long-intangible visions which have flitted across us;--the beautiful ghost of the Ideal within us, which we invoke in the Gadara of our still closets, with the wand of the simple pen! It was early noon, the day after he had formed his acquaintance with the De Montaignes, that Maltravers sat in his favourite room;--the one he had selected for his study from the many chambers of his large and solitary habitation.