ainful employment.

Now about that prime department of the press called the business
office. Many people firmly believe that all book reviews--and dramatic
criticisms and editorials--are bought by "the interests." One of the
principal librarians of New York holds this view of reviews. I never
knew a reviewer who was bound to tell anything but the truth as he saw
it. Nor have I ever written in any review a word that I knew to be
false; and I believe that few reviewers do. Because, however, this or
that publishing house was "a friend of ours," or because the husband of
this author used to work for the paper (pure sentiment!), or that one
is a friend of the wife of The Editor (caution!), it has been suggested
to me by my chief that I "go easy" with certain books.

The good reviewer does go easy with most books. It is a mark of his
excellence as a reviewer that he has a catholic taste, that he sees
that books are written to many standards, and that every book, almost,
is meet for some. It is not his business to break things on the wheel;
but to introduce the book before him to its proper audience; always
recognising, of course, sometimes with pleasant subtle irony, its
limitations. It is only when a book pretends to be what it is not,
that he damns it. All that is not business, but sensible, sensitive
criticism.

To return. The business office exerts not a direct but a moral
influence, so to put it, upon the literary department. Business tact
must be recognised. A hostile review already in type and in the plan
of the next issue may be "killed" when a large "ad" announcing books
brought out by the publisher of this one so treated comes in for the
next paper; and then search is made for a book from the same publisher
which may be favourably reviewed. Or a hostile review may be held over
until a time more politic for its release, say following several
enthusiastic reviews. And there is no sense in noticing in one issue a
disproportionate number of books published by one house.

In concluding my discussion I will draw two portraits of professional
reviewers, one composite of a class, the other a picture of a man who
stands at the top of his profession.

Seated at his desk is a little man with a pointed beard and a large
bald spot on top of his head. This man has been all his life a
literary hack. He has read manuscript for publishing houses; he has
novelised popular plays for ha-penny papers, and dramatised