jolt to me to read a lengthy article
by another reviewer of the same book, who set forth that Lady Gregory
was an extremely serious person, with never a smile, and who gave
copious evidence of this point in quotations. Each of us made out a
perfectly good case.

Now suppose you read in the New York _This_, a daily paper, that
Such-and-Such a book was the best thing of its kind since Adam. And
suppose you found the same opinion to be that of the New York _Weekly
That_ and of the New York _Weekly Other_. Notwithstanding that the New
York Something-Else declared that this was the rottenest hook that ever
came from the press, you would be inclined to accept the conclusion of
the majority of critics, would you not? Well, I'll tell you this: the
man who "does" the fiction week by week for the New York _This_ and for
_The That_ and for _The Other_, is one and the same industrious person.
I know him well. He has a large family to support (which is
continually out of shoes) and his wife just presented him with a new
set of twins the other day. He is now trying to add the job on _The
Something-Else_ to his list.

Let us farther suppose that you are a magazine editor. You wrote this
Such-and-Such book yourself. You are a very disagreeable person (we
will imagine). You rejected three of my stories about my experiences
as a vagabond. Farthermore, when I remonstrated with you about this
over the telephone, you told me that you were very busy. When your
book came out I happened to review it for three papers. I tried to do
it justice although I didn't think much of the book, or of anything
else that you ever did.

Now, reflecting upon the vast frailty of human nature, and considering
the power of the reviewer to exercise petty personal pique, I think
there is little dishonesty of this nature in reviews. The prejudice is
the other way round, in "log rolling," as it is called, among little
cliques of friends. Though I have known more than one case more or
less like that of a reviewer man, otherwise fairly well balanced, who
had a rabid antipathy to the work of Havelock Ellis. Whenever he got
hold of a book of Havelock Ellis's he became blind and livid with rage.

In the period when I was a free lance reviewer, I used to review
generally only books that I was particularly interested in, books on
subjects with which I was familiar, books by authors whom I knew all
about. And in writing my reviews I used to wait now and