PREFACE. HE other day, at the Literary Fund dinner, in an eloquent and practical address, the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone condemned the encouragement too often given to an aspirant for literary honours simply on the ground of the disadvantages under which said aspirant had written. The Premier said that to support and encourage a book simply because it was written by a mechanic, or by some person who could not be expected from his position to write a book, was an injury to the man himself and to society. All literary works should stand on their own merits, and no man has a right to claim indulgence because of the educational disadvantages under which his book may be produced. I commend this practical philosophy to some of my numerous correspondents. An editor suffers much at the hands of uncommissioned contributors; but most from amateur writers, from men and women and young people who, somehow discovering that they can turn a rhyme or build up a reasonably good sentence, suddenly believe they have a call to the world of Letters. Thereupon they commence to pester editors everywhere; but as I am here and there credited with the weakness of editorial courtesy, they all seem to fix upon me for their first or last efforts at publication. In many cases their MSS. are accompanied by long confidential letters, appeals to one's feelings, attacks on one's sympathy. Now and then I detect something of merit in an amateur article ; but too often the merit lies in the evident disadvantages of the circumstances under which the paper has been written. Misled on this tack, I return a civil reply and say, "Try again; you may succeed." The writer tries again. He does not succeed. I say so. His MS. goes back. Then I have been unkind; I have raised hopes only to blight them. Sometimes the MS. is lost or mislaid, the writer having omitted to put his name or address upon it. Then it cannot be returned; and the young author pours out his wrath wildly upon the editor. I sympathise with him, despite the suffering he causes; but I tell him now, as I have told him before, that if he would retain his literary treasures, he must keep copies of them. This is easily done; the manifold letter writer and the copying press are old institutions. Another troublesome contributor is the young author whose first |