... forty years ago. Then the person interviewed went grandly on: "In his manner of writing the great novelist was very different from the modern fashion. He wrote with such care that judged by modern standards he would be considered a trifle slow." Tut-tut! It may interest the gentleman interviewed to learn that no modern writer would dare to produce work at the rate at which Scott, Dickens, Trollope, and Thackeray produced it when their prices were at their highest. The rate ... — Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett