As a class, publishers' readers are not vocal. They spend their days and
nights assiduously (in the literal sense) bent over mediocre stuff,
poking and poring in the unending hope of finding something rich and
strange. A gradual _stultitia_ seizes them. They take to drink; they
beat their wives; they despair of literature. Worst, and most
preposterous, they one and all nourish secret hopes of successful
authorship. You might think that the interminable flow of turgid
blockish fiction that passes beneath their weary eyes would justly
sicken them of the abominable gymnastic of writing. But no: the venom is
in the blood.

Great men have graced the job--and got out of it as soon as possible.
George Meredith was a reader once; so was Frank Norris; also E.V. Lucas
and Gilbert Chesterton. One of the latter's comments on a manuscript is
still preserved. Writing of a novel by a lady who was the author of many
unpublished stories, all marked by perseverance rather than talent, he
said, "Age cannot wither nor custom stale her infinite lack of variety."
But alas, we hear too little of these gentlemen in their capacity as
publishers' pursuivants. Patrolling the porches of literature, why did
they not bequeath us some pandect of their experience, some rich
garniture of commentary on the adventures that befell? But they, and
younger men such as Coningsby Dawson and Sinclair Lewis, have gone on
into the sunny hayfields of popular authorship and said nothing.

But these brilliant swallow-tailed migrants are not typical. Your true
specimen of manuscript reader is the faithful old percheron who is
content to go on, year after year, sorting over the literary pemmican
that comes before him, inexhaustible in his love for the delicacies of
good writing, happy if once or twice a twelve-month he chance upon some
winged thing. He is not the pettifogging pilgarlic of popular