had gone into the tailor business or that his father had left him a
grocery store. He would not have succeeded, however, as either a
tailor or a grocer, as he has even less business than literary ability.
Farther, he regards himself as a gentleman, and books strike him as
being more gentlemanly than trade. He has got along as well as he has,
by bluff about his extensive acquaintance with literature, and his long
experience in writing and publishing.

This type of reviewing man says that he does the thing "mechanically."
About the new crop of juvenile books, let us say, he says the same
thing again now that he said four years ago. "One idea every other
paragraph," is his principle, and he thinks it sufficient in a review.
Sufficient, that is, to "get by." And whatever gets by, in his view,
"pleases them just as well as anything else." Our friend of this
character has a considerable number of stock remarks which may at any
time be written very rapidly. One of these sentences is: "This book
furnishes capital reading;" another says that this book "is welcome;"
and he holds as a general principle that, "the reviewer who reads the
book is lost."

Occasionally, very occasionally, there is found among reviewers the
type of old-fashioned person who used to be called a "man of letters."
This is a wild dream, but it would be a grand thing for American
reviewing if every one of our young reviewers could have for an hour
each week the moral benefit of the society of such a man. I know one
who now has been active in New York literary journalism for something
like thirty years--a fine intellectual figure of a man. He makes his
living out of this, indeed, but his interest is in the thing itself, in
literature. He has all that one really needs in the world, he has the
esteem of the most estimable people, and he follows with unceasing