e police. I didn't pay my subscription in order to have
my choice of books limited to such books as some frock-coated personage in
Oxford Street thought good for me. I've spent about forty years in
learning to know what I like in literature, and I don't want anybody to
teach me. I'm not a young girl, I'm a middle-aged man; but I don't see why
I should be handicapped by that. And if I am to be handicapped I'm going
to chuck Mudie's. I've already written them a very rude letter about Mr.
de Morgan's "It Never Can Happen Again." I wanted that book. They told me
they didn't supply it. And when I made a row they wrote me a soothing
letter nearly as long as the Epistle to the Ephesians explaining why they
didn't supply it. Something about two volumes and half a sovereign.... I
don't know, and I don't care. I don't care whether a book's in one volume
or in a hundred volumes. If I want it, and if I've paid for the right to
have it, I've got to have it, or I've got to have my money back. They
mumbled something in their letter about having received many complaints
from other subscribers about novels being in two volumes. But what do I
care about other subscribers?"

* * * * *

And he continues, after a deviation into forceful abuse: "I don't want to
force novels in two volumes down the throats of other subscribers. I don't
want to force anything down their throats. They aren't obliged to take
what they don't want. There are lots of books circulated by Mudie's that I
strongly object to--books that make me furious--as regards both moral and
physical heaviness and tediousness and general tommy-rot. But do I write
and complain, and ask Mudie's to withdraw such books altogether? If Mudie
came along with a pistol and two volumes by Hall Caine, and said to me,
'Look here, I'll make you have these,' then perhaps I might begin to
murmur gently. But he doesn't. I'll say this for Mudie; he doesn't force
you to take particular books. You can always leave what you don't want.
All these people who are (alleged to be) crying out for a
censorship--they're merely idle! If they really want a censorship they
ought to exercise it themselves. Robinson has a daughter, and he is
shocked at the idea of her picking up a silly sham-erotic novel by a
member of the aristocracy, or a first-rate beautiful thing by George
Moore.... Am I then to be deprived of the chance of studying the inane
psychology of the ruling classes or of