As to the comparative effects of the two systems on literary quality, no prudent observer with adequate experience will lay down an unalterable rule.  Habit no doubt counts for a great deal, but apart from habit there are differences of temperament and peculiar sensibilities.  Some men write best when they sign what they write; they find impersonality a mystification and an incumbrance; anonymity makes them stiff, pompous, and over-magisterial.  With others, however, the effect is just the reverse.  If they sign, they become self-conscious, stilted, and even pretentious; it is only when they are anonymous that they recover simplicity and ease.  It is as if an actor who is the soul of what is natural under the disguises of his part, should become extremely artificial if he were compelled to come upon the stage in his own proper clothes and speaking only in his ordinary voice.

The newspaper press has not yet followed the example of the new Reviews, but we are probably not far from the time when here, too, the practice of signature will make its way.  There was a silly cry at one time for making the disuse of anonymity compulsory by law.  But we shall no more see this than we shall see legal penalties imposed for publishing a book without an index, though that also has been suggested.  The same end will be reached by other ways.  Within the last few years a truly surprising shock has been given to the idea of a newspaper, “as a sort of impersonal thing, coming from nobody knows where, the readers never thinking of the writer, nor caring whether he thinks what he writes, so long as they think what he writes.”  Of course it is still true, and will most likely always remain true, that, like the Athenian Sophist, great newspapers will teach the conventional prejudices of those who pay for it.  A writer will long be able to say that, like the Sophist, the newspaper reflects the morality, the intelligence, the tone of sentiment, of its public, and if the latter is vicious, so is the former.  But there is infinitely less of this than there used to be.  The press is more and more taking the tone of a man speaking to a man.  The childish imposture of the editorial We is already thoroughly exploded.  The names of all important journalists are now coming to be as publicly known as the names of important members of parliament.  There is even something over and above this.  More than one editor has boldly aspired to create and educate a public of his own, and he has succeeded.  The press is growing to be much more personal, in the sense that its most important directors are taking to themselves the right of pursuing an individual line of their own, with far less respect than of old to the supposed exigencies of party or the communiques of political leaders.  The editor of a Review of great eminence said to the present writer (who, for his own part, took a slightly more modest view) that he regarded himself as equal in importance to seventy-five Members