cheapest are not offensive to the eye altogether, as
they lie closed on the dealer's counter, though when you open them you
find them sometimes printed on paper of the wood-pulp, wood-pulpy sort,
and very loathly to the touch. Others of the cheapest present their
literature on paper apparently as good as that of the dearest; and as it
is not always money which buys literary value, especially from the
beginners in literature, there seemed every reason for the poet to hope
that there would be as good poetry in the one sort as in the other. In
his generous animation, he hoped to find some good poetry on the
wood-pulp paper just as in the Golden Age he might have found it carved
by amorous shepherds on the bark of trees.

He promised himself a great and noble pleasure from his verification of
the opinion he shared with that elder and better poet, and if his
delight must be mixed with a certain feeling of reserved superiority, it
could hardly be less a delight for that reason. In turning critic, the
friendliest critic, he could not meet these dear and fair young poets on
their own level, but he could at least keep from them, and from himself
as much as possible, the fact that he was looking down on them. All the
magazines before him were for the month of January, and though it was
possible that they might have shown a certain exhaustion from their
extraordinary efforts in their Christmas numbers, still there was a
chance of the overflow of riches from those numbers which would trim the
balance and give them at least the average poetic value. At this point,
however, it ought to be confessed that the poet, or critic, was never so
willing a reader as writer of occasional verse, and it cannot be denied
that there was some girding up of the loins for him before the grapple
with that half-hundred of magazines. Though he took them at their
weakest point, might they not be too much for him?

He fetched a long breath, and opened first that magazine, _clarum et
venerabile nomen_, from which he might reasonably expect the greatest
surprises of merit in the verse. There were only two pieces, and neither
seemed to him of the old-time quality, but neither was such as he would
himself have perhaps rejected if he had been editor. Then he plunged at
the heap, and in a fifteen-cent magazine of recent renown he found among
five poems a good straight piece of realistic characterization which did
much to cheer him. In this, a little piece of tw