was Bill Somethingorother. He was an earnest person, without humour
(strange for an Irishman!), eloquent, very pronounced in his opinions;
and he had never read anything at all (outside of Columbia University)
before he was called to the literary profession. Later he went into
politics, and became something at Washington. Some reviewers, again,
are lexicographers. I know about a dozen of these, ranging in age from
twenty-seven years to seventy. When they had finished writing the
dictionary, they joined the army of the unemployed, and became
reviewers. I am acquainted with one reviewer who has been everything,
almost, under the sun--a husband, a father, and a householder; he has
been successively a socialist, an aesthete, a Churchman, and a Roman
Catholic. He is an eager student of the universe, a prodigiously
energetic journalist, a lively and a humorous writer, a person of
marked talent. He will be thirty shortly.

Sometimes reviews are charmingly written by veteran literary men, such
as, for instance, Mr. Le Gallienne, and Mr. Huneker. Dr. Perry
mentions among reviewers a group of seasoned bookmen, including Mr.
Paul Elmer More and Professor Frank Mather, Jr. Mr. Boynton is another
sound workman. On the other hand, by some papers, books are
economically given out for review to reporters. And again (for the
same reason), to editorial writers and to various editors. In
America, you know, practically everybody connected with a newspaper is
an editor. The man who sits all day in his shirt sleeves smoking a
corncob pipe, clipping up with large scissors vast piles of newspapers,
is exchange editor. There was a paper for which I worked from morn
till dewy eve, reviewing hooks, where we used to say that we had an
elevator editor and a scrub editor, and a nice charwoman she was.

Reviewers of course frequently differ widely in their conceptions of a