Not a few such persons nourish preposterous ambitions; there are warehouse clerks privately preparing (without any means or prospect of them) for a call to the Bar, drapers' assistants who 'go in' for the preliminary examination of the College of Surgeons, and untaught men innumerable who desire to procure enough show of education to be eligible for a curacy.
Candidates of this stamp frequently advertise in the newspapers for cheap tuition, or answer advertisements which are intended to appeal to them; they pay from sixpence to half-a-crown an hour--rarely as much as the latter sum.

Occasionally it happened that Harold Biffen had three or four such pupils in hand, and extraordinary stories he could draw from his large experience in this sphere.
Then as to his authorship .-- But shortly after the discussion of Greek metres he fell upon the subject of his literary projects, and, by no means for the first time, developed the theory on which he worked.
'I have thought of a new way of putting it.

What I really aim at is an absolute realism in the sphere of the ignobly decent.

The field, as I understand it, is a new one; I don't know any writer who has treated ordinary vulgar life with fidelity and seriousness.

Zola writes deliberate tragedies; his vilest figures become heroic from the place they fill in a strongly imagined drama.