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 nothing else. There comes to be competition among the idolaters who collect relics of a great man, which proves the spread, not of a real appreciation, but of the knowledge that appreciation is the correct thing. A poet, I fancy, has often most worthy adherents when the adherents are few, and the spread of his fame implies the growth of sham sentiments.

The bad results of this more or less factitious enthusiasm are too familiar to be insisted upon. Everybody agrees that the interviewer, contemporary or posthumous, is capable of becoming an intolerable nuisance, and is a specific for the encouragement of morbid tendencies in poets. Literature is, in all cases, a demoralising occupation, though some people can resist its evil influences. It is demoralising because success implies publicity. A poet has to turn himself inside out by the very conditions of his art, and suffers from the incessant stimulants applied to his self-consciousness. The temptation is inevitable, and is, of course, the stronger and the more corrupting as the right to satisfy a vulgar curiosity is more generally admitted. Formerly, if a man wanted to talk about himself, he wrote an autobiography to be published