lishers on the outside, and
he knew at once before opening it that it contained reviews. He tore
off the wrapper eagerly, for now at last he would learn whether he had
made a bold and successful stroke, or only a frightful mistake.

Beginners have taken up reviews before now, cowering in anticipation
before the curse of Balaam, to receive an unexpected benediction; but
perhaps no one could be quite so unprepared for this pleasant form of
surprise as Mark, for others have written the works that are
criticised, and though they may have worked themselves up into a
surface ferment of doubt and humility, deep down in their hearts there
is a wonderfully calm acceptance, after the first shock, of the most
extravagant eulogy.

The opening paragraphs of the first critique were enough to relieve
Mark's main anxiety; Holroyd's book was not a failure--there could be
no doubt of that--it was treated with respectful consideration as the
work of a man who was entitled to be taken seriously; if reviews had
any influence (and it can scarcely be questioned that a favourable
review has much) this one alone could not fail to bring 'Illusion' its
fair share of attention.

Mark laid down the first paper with a sense of triumph. If a very
ordinary book like poor Holroyd's was received in this way, what
might he not expect when he produced his own!

Then he took up the next. Here the critic was more measured in his
praise. The book he pronounced to be on the whole a good and very
nearly a great one, a fine conception fairly worked out, but there was
too strong a tendency in parts to a certain dreamy mysticism (here
Mark began to regret that he had not been more careful over the
proofs), while the general tone was a little too metaphysical, and the
whole marred by even more serious blemishes.

'The author,' continued the reviewer, 'whose style is for the most
part easy and dignified, with a praiseworthy absence of all inflation
or bombast, seems at times to have been smitten by a fatal desire to
"split the ears of the groundlings" and produce an impression by showy
parades of a not overwhelmingly profound scholarship; and the effect
of these contrasts would be grotesque in the extreme, were it not
absolutely painful in a work of such high average merit. What, for
instance, will be thought of the taste of a writer who could close a
really pathetic scene of estrangement between the lovers by such a
sentence as the following?...'

The sent