a moment's quiet before taking it off again. I might guess the writers
sometimes by the handwriting, but there is more trouble taken to disguise
the chirography than I choose to take to identify it as that of any
particular member of our company.

The turn the conversation took, especially the slashing onslaught of
Number Seven on the writers of verse, set me thinking and talking about
the matter. Number Five turned on the stream of my discourse by a
question.

"You receive a good many volumes of verse, do you not?" she said, with a
look which implied that she knew I did.

I certainly do, I answered. My table aches with them. My shelves groan
with them. Think of what a fuss Pope made about his trials, when he
complained that

"All Bedlam or Parnassus is let out"!

What were the numbers of the

"Mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease"

to that great multitude of contributors to our magazines, and authors of
little volumes--sometimes, alas! big ones--of verse, which pour out of
the press, not weekly, but daily, and at such a rate of increase that it
seems as if before long every hour would bring a book, or at least an
article which is to grow into a book by and by?

I thanked Heaven, the other day, that I was not a critic. These