trashy
novels for cheap producers; he has done routine chore writing in
magazine offices, made translations for pirate publishers, and picked
up an odd sum now and then by a "Sunday story." He has always been an
anonymous writer. He has never had sufficient intellectual character
to do anything well. The downward side of middle age finds him
afflicted with various physical ailments, entirely dependent upon a
precarious position at a moderate salary, without influential friends,
completely disillusioned, with a mediocre mind now much fagged, devoid
of high ambition, and with a most unstimulating prospect before him.
His attitude toward the business of book reviewing is that he wishes he
had gone into the tailor business or that his father had left him a
grocery store. He would not have succeeded, however, as either a
tailor or a grocer, as he has even less business than literary ability.
Farther, he regards himself as a gentleman, and books strike him as
being more gentlemanly than trade. He has got along as well as he has,
by bluff about his extensive acquaintance with literature, and his long
experience in writing and publishing.

This type of reviewing man says that he does the thing "mechanically."
About the new crop of juvenile books, let us say, he says the same
thing again now that he said four years ago. "One idea every other
paragraph," is his principle, and he thinks it sufficient in a review.
Sufficient, that is, to "get by." And whatever gets by, in his view,
"pleases them just as well as anything else." Our friend of this
character has a considerable number of stock remarks which may at any
time be written very rapidly. One of these sentences is: "This book
furnishes capital reading;" another says that this book "is welcome;"
and he holds as a general principle that, "the reviewer who reads the
book is lost."

Occasionally, very occasionally, there is found among reviewers the
type of old-fashioned person who used to be called a "man of letters."
This is a wild dream, but it would be a grand thing for American
reviewing if every one of our young reviewers could have for an hour
each week the moral benefit of the society of such a man. I know one
who now has been active in New York literary journalism for something
like thirty years--a fine intellectual figure of a man. He makes his
living out of this, indeed, but his interest is in the thing itself, in
literature. He has all that one really ne