ful things so
poetically set forth in a preceding paragraph! Lightly earned, lightly
spurned, is the sense, if not the exact phrasing, of an old proverb. There
is no telling how we should value many of our possessions if they were
more arduously come by: our relatives, our husbands and wives, our
presentation poetry from the unpoetical, our invitation-cards to one-man
shows in Bond Street, the auto-photographs of great actors, the flatteries
of the unimportant, the attentions of the embarrassing: how might we not
value all such treasures, if they were, so to say, restricted to a
limited issue, and guaranteed 'not to be reprinted'--'plates destroyed and
type distributed.'

Indeed, all nature is on the side of limited editions. Make a thing cheap,
she cries from every spring hedgerow, and no one values it. When do we
find the hawthorn, with its breath sweet as a milch-cow's; or the wild
rose, with its exquisite attar and its petals of hollowed pearl--when do
we find these decking the tables of the great? or the purple bilberry, or
the boot-bright blackberry in the entremets thereof? Think what that
'common dog-rose' would bring in a limited edition! And new milk from the
cow, or water from the well! Where would champagne be if those intoxicants
were restricted by expensive licence, and sold in gilded bottles? What
would you not pay for a ticket to see the moon rise, if nature had not
improvidently made it a free entertainment; and who could afford to buy a
seat at Covent Garden if Sir Augustus Harris should suddenly become sole
impresario of the nightingale?

Yes, 'from scarped cliff and quarried stone,' Nature cries, 'Limit the
Edition! Distribute the type!'--though in her capacity as the great
publisher she has been all too prodigal of her issues, and ruinously
guilty of innumerable remainders. In fact, it is by her warning rather
than by her example that we must be guided in this matter. Let us not
vulgarise our books, as she has done her stars and flowers. Let us, if
need be, make our editions smaller and smaller, our prices increasingly
'prohibitive,' rather than that we should forget the wonder and beauty of
printed dream and thought, and treat our books as somewhat less valuable
than wayside weeds.

A PLEA FOR THE OLD PLAYGOER

He's a nuisance, of course. But to see only that side of him is to think,
as the shepherd boy piped, 'as though' you will 'never grow old.' Does he
never appeal to you with any m