rforce lie idle in your drawer though it
sparkle with the brilliants of wit, and five or ten years hence
collectors may list it in their catalogues. No mount of piety along
Sixth Avenue will accept it in pawn, no Hartford Lunch will exchange it
for corned beef hash and dropped egg. This is a dismal thing.

This means that there is an amusing and a competent living to be gained
by a literary agent of a new kind. Think how many of the most famous
writers have trod the streets ragged and hungry in their early days.
There were times when they would have sold their epics, their novels,
their essays, for the price of a square meal. Think of the booty that
would accumulate in the shop of a literary pawnbroker. The early work of
famous men would fill his safe to bursting. Later on he might sell it
for a thousand times what he gave. There is nothing that grows to such
fictitious value as manuscript.

Think of Francis Thompson, when he was a bootmaker's assistant in
Leicester Square. He was even too poor to buy writing materials. His
early poems were scribbled on scraps of old account books and wrapping
paper. How readily he would have sold them for a few shillings. Or Edgar
Poe in the despairing days of his wife's illness. Or R.L.S. in the fits
of depression caused by his helpless dependence upon his father for
funds. What a splendid opportunity these crises in writers' lives would
offer to the enterprising buyer of manuscripts!

Be it understood, of course, that the pawnbroker must be himself an
appreciator of good things. No reason why he should buy poor stuff, even
though the author of it be starving. Richard Le Gallienne has spoken
somewhere of the bookstores which sell "books that should never have
been written to the customers who should never have been born." Our
pawnbroker must guard himself against buying this kind of stuff. He will
be besieged with it. Very likely Mr. Le Gallienne himself will be the
first to offer him some. But his task will be to discover new and true
talent beneath its rags, and stake it to a ham sandwich when that homely
bite will mean more than a dinner at the Ritz ten years later.

The idea of the literary pawnbroker comes to me from the (unpublished)
letters of John Mistletoe, author of the "Dictionary of Deplorable
Facts," that wayward and perverse genius who wandered the Third Avenue
saloons when he might have been feted by the Authors' League had he
lived a few years longer. Some day, I ho