 at all, but had got in among the others by
mistake.
    The essay, perhaps on account of the passage about the psalms, created quite
a sensation, and on the whole was well received. Ernest's friends praised it
more highly than it deserved, and he was himself very proud of it, but he dared
not show it at Battersby. He knew also that he was now at the end of his tether;
this was his one idea (I feel sure he had caught more than half of it from other
people) and now he had not another thing left to write about. He found himself
cursed with a small reputation - which seemed to him much bigger than it was,
and a consciousness that he could never keep it up. Before many days were over
he felt his unfortunate essay to be a white elephant to him, which he must feed
by hurrying into all sorts of frantic attempts to cap his triumph, and, as may
be imagined, these attempts were failures.
    He did not understand that if he waited and listened and observed, another
idea of some kind would probably occur to him some day, and that the development
of this would in its turn suggest still further ones. He did not yet know that
the very worst way of getting hold of ideas is to go hunting expressly after
them. The way to get them is to study something of which one is fond, and to
note down whatever crosses one's mind in reference to it, either during study or
relaxation, in a little notebook kept always in the waistcoat pocket. Ernest has
got to know all about this now, but it took him a long time to find it out, for
this is not the kind of thing that is taught at schools and universities.
    Nor yet did he know that ideas, no less than the living beings in whose
minds they arise, must be begotten by parents not very unlike themselves - the
most original still differing but slightly from the parents that have given rise
to them. Life is like a fugue, everything must grow out of the subject, and
there must be nothing new. Nor, again, did he see how hard it is to say where
one idea ends and another begins, nor yet how closely this is paralleled in the
difficulty of saying where a life begins or ends, or an action, or indeed
anything - there being a unity in spite of infinite multitude, and an infinite
multitude in spite of unity. He thought ideas came into clever people's heads by
a kind of spontaneous generation, without parentage in the thoughts of
