WHAT COMES OF PUBLISHING A BOOK


It is only just to Tyre to acknowledge that it behaved quite
sympathetically towards the young poet thus discovered in its midst. Its
newspapers reviewed him with marked kindness,--a kindness which in a few
years' time, when he had long since grown out of his baby volume, he was
obliged to set to the credit of the general goodness of human nature,
rather than to the poetic quality of his own verses. In many unexpected
quarters also he met with recognition which, if not always intelligent,
was at least gratifying. For praise, or at least some form of notice, is
breath in the nostrils of the young poet. He hungers to feel that his
personality counts for something, though it be merely to anger his
fellow-men. It was perhaps no very culpable vanity on his part to be
pleased that people began to point him out in the streets, and whisper
that that was the young poet; and that distant acquaintances seemed
more ready to smile at him than before. Now and again one of these would
stop him to say how pleased he had been to see the kind article about
him in _The Tyrian Daily Mail_, and that he intended to buy "the work"
as soon as possible. Henry smiled to himself, to hear his frail little
flower of a volume spoken of as a "work," as though it had been the
Encyclopaedia Britannica; and he rather wondered what that would-be
purchaser would make of it, as he turned over pages of which so large a
proportion was reserved for a spotless frame of margin. No doubt he
would decide that the margin had been left for the purpose of making
notes,--making notes on those abstruse rose-petals of boyish song!

Even in far-away London,--which was as yet merely a sounding name to
these young people,--hard-worked reviewers, contemptuously disposing of
batches of new poetry in a few lines, found a kind word or two to say