Consequently, this sudden development of capacity on the part of the poet
is liable to take him unprepared, and the mere apparition of a poet who
can add up a pounds shillings and pence column offhand might well induce
apoplexy. Yet it is to be feared that that providence which arms every
evil thing with its fang has so protected the publisher with an
instinctive dread of verse in any form, and especially in manuscript, that
he has, after all, little to fear from the poet's new gifts.


II

But, indeed, my image just now was both uncomplimentary and unjust: for,
parallel with the change in the poet to which I have referred, a still
more unnatural change is making itself apparent in the type of the
publisher. It would almost seem as if the two are changing places. Instead
of the poet humbly waiting, hat in hand, kicking his heels for half a day
in the publisher's office, it is the publisher who seeks him, who writes
for appointments at his private house, or invites him to dinner. Yet it
behoves the poet to be on his guard. A publisher, like another personage,
has many shapes of beguilement, and it is not unlikely that this
flattering deference is but another wile to entrap the unwary. There is
no way of circumventing the dreamer so subtle as to flatter his business
qualities. We all like to be praised for the something we cannot do. It is
for this reason that Mr. Stevenson interferes with Samoan politics, when
he should be writing romances--just the desire of the dreamer to play the
man of action.

But I am not going to weary you by indulging in the stale old diatribes
against the publisher. For, to speak seriously the honest truth, I think
they are in the main a very much abused race. Thackeray put the matter