of one who never
reads what they say, I can afford to wish them lively luck and better
game in some quivering writer who takes the big pile of what it is the
fashion to call criticisms from the publisher's table, and
conscientiously reads them through. With _this_ form of being "put
to the question" I will have nothing to do. If it gives amusement to the
reviewers, they are welcome to their sport. But they stab at the summer
air, so far as any writer is concerned who has the pertinacity of
purpose to let them alone.

Long after I had adopted the rule to read no notices of my work, I
learned from George Eliot that the same had been her custom for many
years, and felt reenforced in the management of my little affairs by
this great example. Discussing the question once, with one of our
foremost American writers, I was struck with something like holy envy in
his expression. He had received rough handling from those "critics" who
seem to consider authors as their natural foes, and who delight in
aiming the hardest blows at the heaviest enemy. His fame is immeasurably
superior to that of all his reviewers put together.

"Don't you really read them?" he asked, wistfully. "I wish I could say
as much. I'm afraid I shouldn't have the perseverance to keep that up
right along."

In interesting contrast to all this discord from the outside, came the
personal letters. The book was hardly under way before the storm of them
set in. It began like a New England snow-storm, with a few large,
earnest flakes; then came the swirl of them, big and little, sleet and
rain, fast and furious, regular and irregular, scurrying and tumbling
over each other through the Andover mails.

The astonished girl bowed her head before the blast at first, with a
kind of terrified humility. Then, by degrees, she plucked up heart to
give to each letter its due attention.

It would not be very easy to make any one understand, who had not been
through a closely similar experience, just what it meant to live in the
centre of such a whirlwind of human suffering.

It used to seem to me sometimes, at the end of a week's reading of this
large and painful mail, as if the whole world were one great outcry.
What a little portion of it cried to the young writer of one little book
of consolation! Yet how the ear and heart ached under the piteous
monotony! I made it a rule to answer every civil letter that I received;
and as few of them were otherwise, this correspon