ritten in the most atrocious dialect, it
betrayed an ignorance of composition that would have been discreditable
to a polyp. It described the experiences of a female tonsor somewhere
in Idaho, and closed with her Machiavellian manoeuvres to entice into
her shaving chair a man who had bilked her, so that she might slice his
ear. No need to harrow you with more of the same kind. I read almost a
score every week. Often I think of a poem which was submitted to me
once, containing this immortal couplet:

She damped a pen in the ooze of her brain and wrote a verse
on the air,
A verse that had shone on the disc of the sun, had she chosen
to set it there.

Let me beg you, my dears, leave the pen undamped unless your cerebral
ooze really has something to impart. And then, once a year or so, when
one is thinking that the hooves of Pegasus have turned into pigs'
trotters, comes some Joseph Conrad, some Walter de la Mare, some Rupert
Brooke or Pearsall Smith, to restore one's sanity.

Or else--what is indeed more frequent--the reader's fainting spirits are
repaired not by the excellence of the manuscript before him, but by its
absolute literary nonentity, a kind of intellectual Absolute Zero. Lack
of merit may be so complete, so grotesque, that the composition affords
to the sophistic eye a high order of comedy. A lady submits a poem in
many cantos, beginning

Our heart is but a bundle of muscle
In which our passions tumble and tussle.

Another lady begins her novel with the following psychanalysis:

"Thus doth the ever-changing course of things run a perpetual
circle." ... She read the phrase and then reflected, the cause being
a continued prognostication, beginning and ending as it had done the
day before, to-morrow and forever, maybe, of her own ailment, a
paradoxical malady, being nothing more nor less than a pronounced
case of malnutrition of the soul, a broken heart-cord, aggravated by
a total collapse of that portion of the mentalities which had been
bolstered up by undue pride, fallacious arguments, modern foibles
and follies peculiar to the human species, both male and female,
under favorable social conditions, found in provincial towns as well
as in large cities and fashionable watering places.

But as a fitting anodyne to this regrettable case of soul malnutrition,
let me append a description of a robuster female, taken verbatim from a
m