must influence many citizens who join club after club to which they never go, in order to expand their obituary notices.

With all our complainings and dissatisfaction, we cling fondly to our newspapers, and our morning cup of coffee would be tasteless indeed without their cheerful companionship. They may not give us literature, but they aim to do it, and they try to be something better than it is possible to make them. They remind us of the saying of the grumbling Oxford don immortalized in one of the Roundabout Papers, that all claret would be port if it could. We must not look for the polished phrases of Addison or for the eloquent periods of Burke in the broad sheets of our favorite daily, which is wonderful enough in itself and would have seemed marvellous to both of those literary magnates. The press represents the taste and the intelligence of the people; not always marked by culture or refinement, but suited to the needs of the multitude of readers for whom the journals are manufactured. As to their general contents, it is the same now as it was when Charles Sprague, one of our almostforgotten poets, wrote:

Turn to the press, its teeming sheets survey,
Big with the wonders of each passing day;
Births, deaths, and weddings, forgeries, fires, and wrecks,
Harangues and hail-stones, brawls and broken necks.

As Professor Woodberry said, not long ago, in Harper's Magazine: "The effective literature of the city is, in reality, and has long been, its great dailies. In them are to be found all the elements of literature except the qualities that secure permanence." Despite the many mistakes, the annoying errors of the newspapers-we all know how difficult it is to report anything with absolute accuracywe must wonder at the results they achieve, and marvel at the fact that, in the haste of their production, they ever approach the truth.

I have ascertained that it is not difficult for any person commanding a printing - press to master a certain sneering style of comment, which may easily be used upon any book however meritorious, and upon any author however great and powerful. Consider, for example, the Frenchman who said of "Evangeline": "What have I to do with that cow?" Consider also Max Nordau's words regarding what he calls the senseless phrases of Rossetti. Like most reading individuals, prone to echo the views of others, I am in awe of Rossetti, notwithstanding the fact that, according to Mr. F. W. H. Myers, much of his art in speech and color spends itself in the effort to communicate the incommunicable. Nordau quotes the lines:

The hollow halo it was in

Was like an icy crystal cup.

"It is stark nonsense," said the Apostle of Degeneration, "to qualify a plane surface such as a halo by the adjective 'hollow.'" That sort of criticism is cheap; mere verbal trifling, signifying nothing. It is of a piece with that amusing instance of literalism related not long ago, which censured John Hay for making Jim Bludso, an engineer, do the pilot's work, and amended "The Heathen Chinee" so as to read:

In his sleeves, which were long,
He had twenty-four Jacks,

on the ground that no sleeves would hold twenty-four packs, and that the Jacks were the only really valuable cards in the game of euchre.

The tendencies of men have changed but little since Pope said:

.. Numbers err in this,

...

Ten censure wrong for one who writes amiss.

We shall not go far astray if we follow his advice

to

Neglect the rule each verbal critic lays,
For not to know some trifles is a praise;
And men of breeding, sometimes men of wit,
T'avoid great errors, must the less commit.

There are men, it is said, who would indict a metaphor and try a trope; they regard the use of poetic license as a punishable misdemeanor. Our beloved professor of French, General Joseph Kargé, thirty years ago had like views of poetic license, for I remember that every now and then, if he encountered an example of it, he would say, with a fine flashing of the eye, "Gentlemen, I cause you to remark the licentiousness of the poet."

II

Of gas-logs and the private library; with some facts about collectors and collecting.

ONCE

NCE on a time I rashly printed a modest booklet, and a good-natured reviewer, who amazed me by devoting two columns to the task, complained somewhat inconsistently that there was nothing in the book, and that I had tried to compress several volumes of sketches into three hundred pages. Falling into the common error of untrained minds, he arrived at a conclusion wholly unsupported by evidence to wit, that I have a gas-log in my library-room. I never owned or possessed a gas-log in my life; and I never said that I did. I feel a peculiar sense of discomfort in the presence of a gas-log, for it is much more obtrusive than the plain, inoffensive register, or the ugly, self-assertive radiator. A gas-log is an imitation, and therefore a sham. It is really prettier than a radiator, but a radiator makes no pretences; it does not ask you to mistake it for a cannel-coal fire, and it does not pose as an open hearth with real wood. Yet,