ble to bear." It is to be feared
that "the monument more enduring than brass" is not erected with such
rapidity. The only brass associated with the modern best seller is to
be found in the advertisements; and, indeed, all that both purveyor and
consumer seem to care about may well be summed up in the publisher's
recommendation quoted by Professor Phelps: "This book goes with a rush
and ends with a smash." Such, one might add, is the beginning and ending
of all literary rockets.

Now let us recall some fiction that has been in the world anywhere from,
say, three hundred years to fifty years and is yet vigorously alive,
and, in many instances, to be classed still with the best sellers.

_Don Quixote_, for example, was published in 1605, but is still actively
selling. Why? May it perhaps be that it was some six years in the
writing, and that a great man, who was soldier as well as writer,
charged it with the vitality of all his blood and tears and laughter,
all the hard-won humanity of years of manful living, those five years as
a slave in Algiers (actually beginning it in prison once more at La
Mancha), and all the stern struggle of a storm-tossed life faced with
heroic steadfastness and gaiety of heart?

Take another book which, if it is not read as much as it used to be, and
still deserves to be, is certainly far from being forgotten--_Gil Blas_.
Published in 1715--that is, its first two parts--it has now two
centuries of popularity to its credit, and is still as racy with
humanity as ever; but, though Le Sage was a rapid and voluminous writer,
over this one book which alone the world remembers it is significant to
note that he expended unusual time and pains. He was forty-seven years
old when the first two parts were published. The third part was not
published till 1724, and eleven years more were to elapse before the
issue of the fourth and final part in 1735.

A still older book that is still one of the world's best sellers, _The
Pilgrim's Progress_, can hardly be conceived as being dashed off in
sixty or ninety days, and would hardly have endured so long had not
Bunyan put into it those twelve years of soul torment in Bedford gaol.
_Robinson Crusoe_ still sells its annual thousands, whereas others of
its author's books no less skilfully written are practically forgotten,
doubtless because Defoe, fifty-eight years old at its publication, had
concentrated in it the ripe experience of a lifetime. Though a boy's
boo