ow that when I read Mr. Bennett's "Books and Persons," I
was for abandoning a project about which, you will do me the justice of
remembering, I was lukewarm from the first. I enjoyed immensely his
lively papers and I felt pretty sure that no one would so enjoy mine.
Your reader was good enough to point out some reasons, besides the
obvious one, why this must be so; and in self-defence I am going to
remind you of them. When Mr. Bennett wrote for the _New Age_ he was a
famous and full-grown author, very much at his ease, very much at his
liberty, well aware that if he said what he pleased as he pleased his
editor would be only too happy to print it. When I wrote most of the
reviews reprinted in this volume I was commencing journalism, and I
wrote them for the _Athenaeum_.

The _Athenaeum_, the editor of which I take this opportunity of thanking
for permission to reprint my articles, is a paper, was, at any rate, a
paper with ancient and peculiar customs; and of these customs perhaps
the most peculiar was that, while allowing its contributors
extraordinary liberty in some matters, it sustained what may perhaps be
described as a literary policy. Like other venerable institutions, the
_Athenaeum_ had a taste for unwritten law; its policy was adumbrated
rather than defined, but few contributors, I believe, were unconscious
of its existence. Not one of us, I am sure, would have expressed
anything but what he thought and felt, but we all hoped that our
thoughts and feelings would not be too dissimilar from those of our
presiding genius, Athene the wise, our eponymous goddess; because, if
they were, her high-priest, albeit one of the most charming and
accomplished people in Fleet Street or thereabouts, stood ready with the
inexorable blue pencil to smite once and smite no more. In the matter of
expression, too, Her Omniscience was, to my mind, something
over-exacting. Concision is an excellent quality in a writer. We all
know what Ben Jonson said about Shakespeare and we all agree with him.
Still, when, by the shape of one's paragraphs, the balance of one's
sentences, and the internal rhythm of one's clauses, one fancies that an
article has been raised almost to the perfection of a work of art, it is
disappointing to find a line cut out here, two more there, half a dozen
missing from the second galley, and from the third a whole paragraph
gone for no better reason than that they are not essential to the
argument--especially when