The iconoclast is never tired of ruining a belief which has commonly been -accepted as true, and aw writer at-Home has been showing that a novelist belonging to the "prolific brigade" really does not put out an amazing amount of work. A man, who day in and day out wrote 1,000 words a day, would at the end of a year have to his credit three novels of 90,000 words each and three plays of 30,009 words each and a little in hand. That is to say, a little more than a column per diem of this paper would give six such works per annum as above indicated. Tt is not, however, a question merely of writing but of considerable thought and polishing and re-polishing before the written word comes before the ultimate reader. Judged purely from a numerical standpoint the average journalist has the novelist beaten a mile in sheer output, but whereas the former writes for the moment only, the real novelist is striving for something that will last. Consequently, the iconocoast. who suggests that the prolific novelist is not so hardworking as is generally supposed, is wrong. He was hound to be. just as would anyone else who sought to measure mental output with the foot rule.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.