A lady, whom I meet frequently in the British Museum reading-room and
elsewhere, said to me the other day:
“Why don’t you write another _Erewhon_?”
“Why, my dear lady,” I replied, “_Life and Habit_ was another _Erewhon_.”
They say these things to me continually to plague me and make out that I
could do one good book but never any more. She is the sort of person who
if she had known Shakespeare would have said to him, when he wrote _Henry
the IVth_:
“Ah, Mr. Shakespeare, why don’t you write us another _Titus Andronicus_?
Now that was a sweet play, that was.”
And when he had done _Antony and Cleopatra_ she would have told him that
her favourite plays were the three parts of _King Henry VI_.