attenuated volumes of poetry in fancy bindings open their covers at one
like so many little unfledged birds, and one does so long to drop a worm
in,--a worm in the shape of a kind word for the poor fledgling! But what
a desperate business it is to deal with this army of candidates for
immortality! I have often had something to say about them, and I may be
saying over the same things; but if I do not remember what I have said,
it is not very likely that my reader will; if he does, he will find, I am
very sure, that I say it a little differently.

What astonishes me is that this enormous mass of commonplace verse, which
burdens the postman who brings it, which it is a serious task only to get
out of its wrappers and open in two or three places, is on the whole of
so good an average quality. The dead level of mediocrity is in these
days a table-land, a good deal above the old sea-level of laboring
incapacity. Sixty years ago verses made a local reputation, which
verses, if offered today to any of our first-class magazines, would go
straight into the waste-basket. To write "poetry" was an art and mystery
in which only a few noted men and a woman or two were experts.

When "Potter the ventriloquist," the predecessor of the well-remembered
Signor Blitz, went round giving his entertainments, there was something
unexplained, uncanny, almost awful, and beyond dispute marvellous, in his
performances. Those watches that disappeared and came back to their
owners, those endless supplies of treasures from empty hats, and
especially those crawling eggs that travelled all over the magician's
person, sent many a child home thinking that Mr. Potter must have ghostly
assistants, and raised grave doubts in the minds of "professors," that is
members of the church, whether they had not compromised their characters
by being seen at such an unhallowed exhibition. Nowadays, a clever boy
who has made a study of parlor magic can do many of those tricks almost