the peine forte et dure of his profession in the knowledge of honest duty done, writing terse and marrowy little essays on manuscripts, which are buried in the publishers’ files.  This man is an honour to the profession, and I believe there are many such.  Certainly there are many who sigh wistfully when they must lay aside some cherished writing of their own to devote an evening to illiterate twaddle.  Five book manuscripts a day, thirty a week, close to fifteen hundred a year—­that is a fair showing for the head reader of a large publishing house.

One can hardly blame him if he sometimes grow skeptic or acid about the profession of letters.  Of each hundred manuscripts turned in there will rarely be more than three or four that merit any serious consideration; only about one in a hundred will be acceptable for publication.  And the others—­alas that human beings should have invented ink to steal away their brains!  “Only a Lady Barber” is the title of a novel in manuscript which I read the other day.  Written in the most atrocious dialect, it betrayed an ignorance of composition that would have been discreditable to a polyp.  It described the experiences of a female tonsor somewhere in Idaho, and closed with her Machiavellian manoeuvres to entice into her shaving chair a man who had bilked her, so that she might slice his ear.  No need to harrow you with more of the same kind.  I read almost a score every week.  Often I think of a poem which was submitted to me once, containing this immortal couplet: 

    She damped a pen in the ooze of her brain and wrote a verse
        on the air,
    A verse that had shone on the disc of the sun, had she chosen
        to set it there.

Let me beg you, my dears, leave the pen undamped unless your cerebral ooze really has something to impart.  And then, once a year or so, when one is thinking that the hooves of Pegasus have turned into pigs’ trotters, comes some Joseph Conrad, some Walter de la Mare, some Rupert Brooke or Pearsall Smith, to restore one’s sanity.

Or else—­what is indeed more frequent—­the reader’s fainting spirits are repaired not by the excellence of the manuscript before him, but by its absolute literary nonentity, a kind of intellectual Absolute Zero.  Lack of merit may be so complete, so grotesque, that the composition affords to the sophistic eye a high order of comedy.  A lady submits a poem in many cantos, beginning

    Our heart is but a bundle of muscle
    In which our passions tumble and tussle.

Another lady begins her novel with the following psychanalysis: