one best contributor, and all the rest copy.' And this is doubtless
the true account of the manner in which a certain trade mark, a
curious and indefinable unity, settles on every newspaper. Perhaps
it would be possible to name the men who a few years since created
the 'Saturday Review' style, now imitated by another and a younger
race. But when the style of a periodical is once formed, the
continuance of it is preserved by a much more despotic impulse than
the tendency to imitation,--by the self-interest of the editor, who
acts as trustee, if I may say so, for the subscribers. The regular
buyers of a periodical want to read what they have been used to
read--the same sort of thought, the same sort of words. The editor
sees that they get that sort. He selects the suitable, the
conforming articles, and he rejects the non-conforming. What the
editor does in the case of a periodical, the readers do in the case
of literature in general. They patronise one thing and reject the
rest.

Of course there was always some reason (if we only could find it)
which gave the prominence in each age to some particular winning
literature. There always is some reason why the fashion of female
dress is what it is. But just as in the case of dress we know that
now-a-days the determining cause is very much of an accident, so in
the case of literary fashion, the origin is a good deal of an
accident. What the milliners of Paris, or the demi-monde of Paris,
enjoin our English ladies, is (I suppose) a good deal chance; but as
soon as it is decreed, those whom it suits and those whom it does
not all wear it. The imitative propensity at once insures
uniformity; and 'that horrid thing we wore last year' (as the phrase
may go) is soon nowhere to be seen. Just so a literary fashion
spreads, though I am far from saying with equal primitive