d at our table, without any
signature, that I feel quite sure there are at least two or three other
contributors besides myself. There is a tall, old-fashioned silver urn,
a sugar-bowl of the period of the Empire, in which the poems sent to be
read are placed by unseen hands. When the proper moment arrives, I lift
the cover of the urn and take out any manuscript it may contain. If
conversation is going on and the company are in a talking mood, I replace
the manuscript or manuscripts, clap on the cover, and wait until there is
a moment's quiet before taking it off again. I might guess the writers
sometimes by the handwriting, but there is more trouble taken to disguise
the chirography than I choose to take to identify it as that of any
particular member of our company.

The turn the conversation took, especially the slashing onslaught of
Number Seven on the writers of verse, set me thinking and talking about
the matter. Number Five turned on the stream of my discourse by a
question.

"You receive a good many volumes of verse, do you not?" she said, with a
look which implied that she knew I did.

I certainly do, I answered. My table aches with them. My shelves groan
with them. Think of what a fuss Pope made about his trials, when he
complained that

"All Bedlam or Parnassus is let out"!

What were the numbers of the

"Mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease"

to that great multitude of contributors to our magazines, and authors of
little volumes--sometimes, alas! big ones--of verse, which pour out of
the press, not weekly, but daily, and at such a rate of increase that it
seems as if before long every hour would bring a book, or at least an
article which is to grow into a book by and by?

I thanked Heaven, the other day, that I was not a critic. These
attenuated volumes of poetry in fancy bindings open their covers at one
like so many little unfledged birds, and one does so long to drop a worm
in,--a worm in the shape of a kind word for the poor fledgling! But what
a desperate business it is to deal with this army of candidates for
immortality! I have often had something to say about them, and I may be
saying over the same things; but if I do not remember what I have said,
it is not very likely that my reader will; if he does, he will find, I am
very sure, that I say it a little differently.

What astonishes me is that this enormous mass of commonplace verse, which
burdens the postman who brings it, whic