ut sonnets,
ballads, or pastels-in-metre just as he needed them. The checks would
read something like this: 'The Poets' Clearing-house Association of the
City of New York will pay to John Bluepencil, Editor, or Order, Ten
Sonnets. (Signed) Blank Brothers & Co.' Or perhaps we'd receive a
notice from a Southern publisher to this effect: 'Have drawn on you at
sight for eight quatrains and a triolet.' Now, when you consider how
many publishers there are who would always keep a cash balance in the
treasury, you begin to get some notion as to how we could meet our
running expenses and pay our quarterly dividends to our stockholders
anyhow; and as for future dividends, I believe our loan department would
net us a sufficient amount to make the stock gilt-edged."

"You would have a loan department, eh?" said Mr. Pedagog.

"That would be popular," said the Poet; "but there again I dispute the
profit. You could find plenty of poets who would borrow your funds, but
I doubt the security of the loans."

"All of your objections are based on misconceptions," said the Idiot.
"The loan department would not lend money. It would lend poems for a
consideration to those who are short and who need them to fulfil their
obligations."

"Who on earth would want to borrow a poem, I'd like to know?" said the
Bibliomaniac.

"Lovers, chiefly," said the Idiot. "Never having been a poet yourself,
sir, you have no notion how far the mere faculty of being able to dash
off a sonnet to a lady's eyebrow helps a man along in ultimately
becoming the possessor of that eyebrow, together with the rest of the
lady. _I_ have seen women won, sir, by a rondeau. In fact, I have myself
completely routed countless unpoetic rivals by exploding in their ranks
burning quatrains to the fair objects of our affections. With woman the
man who can write a hymn of thanksgiving that he is permitted to gaze
into her cerulean orbs has a great advantage over the wight who has to
tell her she has dandy blue eyes in commonplace prose. The
commonplace-prose wight knows it, too, and he'd pay ten per cent. of his
salary during courtship if he could devise a plan by means of which he
could pass himself off as a poet. To meet this demand, our loan
department would be established. An unimaginative lover could come in
and describe the woman he adored; the loan clerk would fish out a sonnet
to fit the girl, and the lover could borrow it for ten days, just as
brokers borrow stock. Armed