pretty. The author had shuddered no
less at the little paragraphs that the publisher had inserted in the
newspapers concerning his birth and education, wherein he was
bracketed with other well-known writers whose careers at the
University had been equally undistinguished. But now that, like
Byron, he found himself famous among the bacon and eggs, he was in
no mood to remember these past vexations. As soon as he had finished
breakfast he withdrew himself to his study and wrote half an essay
on the Republic of Letters.

In a country wherein fifteen novels--or is it fifty?--are
published every day of the year, the publisher's account of the
goods he sells is bound to have a certain value. Money talks,
as Mr. Arnold Bennett once observed--indeed today it is grown
quite garrulous--and when a publisher spends a lot of money on
advertising a book, the inference is that some one believes the
book to be good. This will not secure a book good notices, but
it will secure it notices of some kind or other, and that, as
every publisher knows, is three-quarters of the battle. The
average critic today is an old young man who has not failed in
literature or art, possibly because he has not tried to
accomplish anything in either. By the time he has acquired some
skill in criticism he has generally ceased to be a critic,
through no fault of his own, but through sheer weariness of
spirit. When a man is very young he can dance upon everyone who
has not written a masterpiece with a light heart, but after
this period of joyous savagery there follows fatigue and a
certain pity. The critic loses sight of his first magnificent
standards, and becomes grateful for even the smallest merit in
the books he is compelled to read. Like a mother giving a
powder to her child, he is at pains to disguise his timid
censure with a teaspoonful of jam. As the years pass by he
becomes afraid of these books that continue to appear in
unreasonable profusion, and that have long ago destroyed his
faith in literature, his love of reading, his sense of humour,
and the colouring matter of his hair. He realises, with a
dreadful sense of the infinite, that when he is dead and buried
this torrent of books will overwhelm the individualities of his
successors, bound like himself to a lifelong examination of the
insignificant.

Timidity is certainly the note of modern criticism, which is rarely
roused to indignation save when confronted by the infrequent outrage
of so