been led to the water, not one horse has yet been made to drink. With
the best, or the worst, will in the world, no publisher can force a book
into acceptance. Advertising will not avail, and reviewing is
notoriously futile. If the book does not strike the popular fancy,
or deal with some universal interest, which need by no means be a
profound or important one, the drums and the cymbals shall be beaten in
vain. The book may be one of the best and wisest books in the world,
but if it has not this sort of appeal in it the readers of it, and,
worse yet, the purchasers, will remain few, though fit. The secret of
this, like most other secrets of a rather ridiculous world, is in the
awful keeping of fate, and we can only hope to surprise it by some lucky
chance. To plan a surprise of it, to aim a book at the public favor,
is the most hopeless of all endeavors, as it is one of the unworthiest;
and I can, neither as a man of letters nor as a man of business, counsel
the young author to do it. The best that you can do is to write the book
that it gives you the most pleasure to write, to put as much heart and
soul as you have about you into it, and then hope as hard as you can to
reach the heart and soul of the great multitude of your fellow-men. That,
and that alone, is good business for a man of letters.

The man of letters must make up his mind that in the United States the
fate of a book is in the hands of the women. It is the women with us who
have the most leisure, and they read the most books. They are far better
educated, for the most part, than our men, and their tastes, if not their
minds, are more cultivated. Our men read the newspapers, but our women
read the books; the more refined among them read the magazines. If they
do not always know what is good, they do know what pleases them, and it
is useless to quarrel with their decisions, for there is no appeal from
them. To go from them to the men would be going from a higher to a lower
court, which would be honestly surprised and bewildered, if the thing