dictionaries will be stolen or destroyed; their publishers will be
boycotted by all members of the League, who will decline to publish with
any man known to deal with amateurs. Nay, so powerful is this dread and
even criminal confederacy, that amateurs will not even be reviewed.
Neither the slashing, nor the puffing, nor the faintly praising notice
will be meted out to them. There will be a conspiracy of silence. The
very circulating libraries will be threatened, and coffins (stolen from
undertakers who dabble in romance) will be laid at Mr. Mudie's door,
unless he casts off the amateur in fiction. The professionals will march
through rapine to emancipation. They will strike off the last gyves that
fetter the noble art of romance, and in five or six years we shall have
only about a tenth of the present number of romances, but that tenth will
pass through as many editions as "The Pilgrim's Progress," which, by the
way, was probably, like Ronsard's poems, the work of an amateur. But
these were other times, when an author did not expect to make money, and
thought himself lucky if, after a slashing personal review by the
Inquisition, his fragments were not burned at the stake in a bonfire of
his volumes.



SOME RARE THINGS FOR SALE.


An American writer has been complaining lately that his countrymen have
lost the habit of reading. This is partly the result of that free trade
in English books which is the only form of free trade that suits the
American Constitution. People do not buy American books any longer,
because they can get English works, mere printed rags, but paying nothing
to English authors, for a few cents. The rags, of course, fall to