To return. The business office exerts not a direct but a moral
influence, so to put it, upon the literary department. Business tact
must be recognised. A hostile review already in type and in the plan
of the next issue may be "killed" when a large "ad" announcing books
brought out by the publisher of this one so treated comes in for the
next paper; and then search is made for a book from the same publisher
which may be favourably reviewed. Or a hostile review may be held over
until a time more politic for its release, say following several
enthusiastic reviews. And there is no sense in noticing in one issue a
disproportionate number of books published by one house.

In concluding my discussion I will draw two portraits of professional
reviewers, one composite of a class, the other a picture of a man who
stands at the top of his profession.

Seated at his desk is a little man with a pointed beard and a large
bald spot on top of his head. This man has been all his life a
literary hack. He has read manuscript for publishing houses; he has
novelised popular plays for ha-penny papers, and dramatised 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