no less at the little paragraphs that the publisher had inserted in the newspapers concerning his birth and education, wherein he was bracketed with other well-known writers whose careers at the University had been equally undistinguished.  But now that, like Byron, he found himself famous among the bacon and eggs, he was in no mood to remember these past vexations.  As soon as he had finished breakfast he withdrew himself to his study and wrote half an essay on the Republic of Letters.

In a country wherein fifteen novels—­or is it fifty?—­are published every day of the year, the publisher’s account of the goods he sells is bound to have a certain value.  Money talks, as Mr. Arnold Bennett once observed—­indeed today it is grown quite garrulous—­and when a publisher spends a lot of money on advertising a book, the inference is that some one believes the book to be good.  This will not secure a book good notices, but it will secure it notices of some kind or other, and that, as every publisher knows, is three-quarters of the battle.  The average critic today is an old young man who has not failed in literature or art, possibly because he has not tried to accomplish anything in either.  By the time he has acquired some skill in criticism he has generally ceased to be a critic, through no fault of his own, but through sheer weariness of spirit.  When a man is very young he can dance upon everyone who has not written a masterpiece with a light heart, but after this period of joyous savagery there follows fatigue and a certain pity.  The critic loses sight of his first magnificent standards, and becomes grateful for even the smallest merit in the books he is compelled to read.  Like a mother giving a powder to her child, he is at pains to disguise his timid censure with a teaspoonful of jam.  As the years pass by he becomes afraid of these books that continue to appear in unreasonable profusion, and that have long ago destroyed his faith in literature, his love of reading, his sense of humour, and the colouring matter of his hair.  He realises, with a dreadful sense of the infinite, that when he is dead and buried this torrent of books will overwhelm the individualities of his successors, bound like himself to a lifelong examination of the insignificant.

Timidity is certainly the note of modern criticism, which is rarely roused to indignation save when confronted by the infrequent outrage of some intellectual anarchist.  If the critics of the more important journals were not so enthusiastic as their provincial confreres, they were at least gentle with “The Improbable Marquis.”  A critic of genius would have said that such books were not worth writing, still less worth reading.  An outspoken critic would have said that it was too dull to be an acceptable presentation of a life that we all find interesting.  As it was, most of the critics praised the style in which it was written because it was quite impossible to call it an enthralling or even an entertaining