1. Good literature has the same value in manuscript as in typescript, but from the standpoint of author and publisher, it can hardly be said to have the same chances. Penmanship does not tend to improve, and some of the scrawly MSS. sent in to publishers are enough to create dismay in the stoutest heart. It is pure affectation to pretend to be above such small matters. Just as a dinner is all the more appetising because it is neatly and daintily served, so a MS. has better chances of being read and appreciated when set out in type-written characters.

2. Be sure that you are sending your MS. to the right publisher. Novels with a strongly developed moral purpose are not exactly the kind of thing wanted by Mr Heinemann; and if you have anything like "The Woman Who Did," don't send it to a Sunday School Publishing Company. These suppositions are no doubt absurd in the extreme, but they will serve my purpose in pointing out the careless way in which many beginners dispose of their wares. Nearly all publishers specialise in some kind of literature, and it is the novelist's duty to study these types from publishers' catalogues, providing, of course, he does not know them already. The commercial instinct is proverbially lacking in authors; if it were not we should witness less frequently the spectacle of portly MSS. being sent out haphazard to publisher after publisher.

3. Perhaps my third point ought to have come first. It relates to the obtaining of an expert's views on the matter and form of your story. This will cost you a guinea, perhaps more, but it will save your time and hasten the possibilities of success. You can easily spend a guinea in postage and two or three more in having the MS. re-typed,—and yet the tale be ever the same—"Declined with thanks." Spare yourself many disappointments by putting your literary efforts before a competent critic, and let him point out the crudities, the digressions, and those weaknesses which betray the 'prentice hand. It will not be pleasant to see a pen line through your "glorious" passages, or two blue pencil marks across a favourite piece of dialogue, but it is better to know your defects at once than to discover them by painful and constant rejections.

4. Be willing to learn; have no fear of hard work; do the best, and write the best that is in you; and never ape anybody, but be yourself.