The trained reporter, commistioned to "do" half a column of Sir John Oracle on "Social Reform,' or any other rhetorician on any other topic, will keep his penci] sternly under control until the great man, in the interval of a round of applause, takes breath for plunge into the deeps of his subject and begins anew; "This is an age... ete. The pencil then flies over paper and next morning the world is entertained with Sir John's commonplace disguised as an original pronouncement upon the spirit of the age. This is an age, we may, therefore. proceed according to well-established precedent, when the pen is paramount, The art of writing has ceased to be a mystery practised by the elect. Whereas in former times men of stters travelled a thousand miles in search of a coveted volume, in these times we can scarcely travel ten yards without encountering an author, acclaimed or in embryo. In very common parlance, "'everybody's doing it." Writers bid fair to outnumber readers. Innumerable training schools are springing up anxious to thrust the prizes of literature into proletarian hands. The poet's bays are to be won by virtue of a little assiduity and a steady correspondence course. Advertisers with a taste for the ironical even venture to fascinate with the gorgeous promise of assistance in the development of brains necessary to the production of a literary masterpiece. The new age will surely be an age for the production of literature by the masses for the masses.
In the meantime, how much litperature is being produced in the avalanche. of printed matter which is pouring from the press? How uch work of essential genius? Most obviously, very little. and especially so in' the sphere of the novel, the now dominant form of literary expression. If we are to believe the critics, the modera school is crowded with clever, brill-lant writers. But how much of their work bears the stamp of the master hand! Among the essayists we have more brilliance, a plenitude of brilliance, but again, where jis the master, the writer with a world-wide appeal, or even a European reputation? And the poets! One star differeth from another only in. degree of lacking. that magic quality which gives immortality to a line. Would one exchange "'St.- Agnes' Eve," or the "Ode to a Grecian Urn," for all the wares in the Poetry Bookshop? Little coteries are "'intrij Y (to use the fashionable word) by this
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.