STORIES OF FAMOUS AUTHORS.

Lyell Times and Central Buller Gazette, Volume VI, Issue 275, 29 May 1886, Page 4

STORIES OF FAMOUS AUTHORS.

The late Joshua B. Lippincott, the publisher, delighted to tell of the peculiarities of the authors he knew. He knew a great many, and some

were strange fellows. " Bulwer was very exclusive and aristocratic," he said. "He always wrote to me in the third person, " Lord Lytton's com-

pliments to Mr Lippincott, &c." When " The Parisians " was coming

out in Blackwood, I offered him

$25,000 for the exclusive right of publishing it in book form, but he declined what I thought a very liberal offer, saying he could get twice that amount. When I visited him at his villa, near Fulham, he received me with exquisite courtesy, for Bulwer was always a perfect gentleman. He wrote in a rich Oriental morning robe, with books of reference, manuscripts, &c, always conveniently at hand. "Carlyle was the most eccentric man I ever knew—rude, rough, and brutal sometimes. I never shall forget the first time I saw him. I called at his modest home in Cheyne Bow, at Chelsea, and, being ushered into what was called a library, I found the philosopher stretched at full length' upon an old rug, smoking a red clay pipe, with a stem a yard long. Without rising, he pointed to a chair and asked me whether I would have a pipe and a glass of whiskey. I declined both, whereupon the sage cried out in a deep Scotch voice: " What! an American, and don't drink or smoke ? Why, man, you are not true to the productions of your country. I smoke American tobacco and drink American whiskey. You are a publisher? A bad trade, sir. Books are a great evil. The day will come when a writer of books will be heartily ashamed of his business. .Some of the American publishers should hoist a black flag over their shops, piracy being their chief business.' " One morning," continued Mr Lippincott, "I was sitting in my 1 office, when a bluff, hearty, broad-' shouldered, red-faced man walked in with quite a bluster, and, without announcing his name, said he wanted me to publish a book he had written about America. I asked him who he was, how long he had been here, and what he knew about the country. He said he was Anthony Trollope; that he had been in America six weeks, and travelled North and West, and was prepared to give his impressions of America, her people and institutions. I told him I would publish his book and allow him a royalty of 10 per cent, on its sales. He agreed to this. I divided the edition with the Harpers; each house putting its name on the copies sold by each. When Trollope heard that Harpers name was attached to the book he thought that some trick had been played upon him, and denounced us both as pirates, saying: * A plague upon both your houses.' Dickens was a precious snob, but a jolly, good-hearted, genial fellow. His marvellous success in the beginning dazzled and dazed him, and he "felt his oats." He had more animal spirits than any man I ever knew, but I think much of his sensibility was sentiment gotten up for the occasion. He saw that sadness and sorrow took in his writings, and he made a regular business of it, became, in short, a professional heart-wringer. The first time he visited America he was very foppish in his dress, wore a profusion of neckcloths, with showy jewellery, &c, was, in fact, what we now call a dude. His hair was elaborately arranged, and he wore it very long. As he grew older, however, he got over these youthful follies, and the last time he was here he was almost entirely changed from the Dickens of a quarter of a century before, who had been treated in this country like a prince, and went home and abused us like a fishwoman. Thackeray was a very different man from Dickens. There was nothing of the fop or the snob about him. He was a gentleman, and would never have been guilty of accepting our hospitality and then laughing at us. He had a hard time of it in his youth, unlike Dickens, who sprang into immediate popularity—from a newspaper reporter becoming, almost at a single bound, the most successful writer of his age. Thackeray was nearly 40 before he scored his first great success in the novel of Vanity Fair. He was never so popular as Dickens, but his writings will outlive those of his rival. There is really more in them; they are a more real picture of the age he intended to represent. Thackeray was fond of a good dinner, and enjoyed the terrapin and canvas-back ducks which the Chesapeake supplies so bountifully to our market. He was more at home at a quite social gathering than at a great

public dinner. He used to enjoy the Saturday nights at the Century Club, New York, where he once met Dr Kane, soon after the latter had returned from one of his voyages to the North Pole. The doctor told Thackeray how he had seen a sailor reading Pendennis by the light of a train-oil lamp beneath a Polar glacier."