—he wrote this 'Trixie,' you know, that everybody's reading."
The reviews he did not read aloud were those which vilified the book. "This novel," began one of these reviews, "ought to be burnt publicly by the common hangman." He did not read that review to his visitors. Nor yet the one which said: "This is probably the worst novel that has ever been written." There were not many notices of this kind, for most of the reviewers who disliked "Trixie" ignored it. These adverse reviews the Archdeacon, like a wise man, destroyed and forgot; those that were complimentary, however, he pasted into an album and read over and over again. They gave him intense pleasure, the intensest indeed that he had ever known; far, far beyond that which he had felt on being made an Archdeacon. And that had been sufficiently enormous.
