Modestly in the rear of the moral reformers, yet not wholly and uniformly unaggressive, nor guiltless altogether of isms and schisms, step forward the literary men.  As a rule, they do not affect expositions, or exhibitions of any kind.  But one general meeting, with some minor and informal ones, is on the programme for them.  This is well.  The world and the fullness thereof belongs to them, and they may care to come forward to scan this schedule of their inheritance.  We do not hear of their having combined to put up a pavilion of their own, like the dairymen and the brewers, “to show the different processes of manufacture.”  The pen will be at work here, nevertheless, and has been from the beginning, before the foundations of the Corliss engine were laid or the granite of Memorial Hall left the quarry.  Without this first of implements none of the other machinery would ever have moved.  The pen is mightier than the piston.  It is the invisible steam that impels all.

[Illustration:  FRENCH RESTAURANT LA FAYETTE.]

In a visible form also it is here.  The publishers of the London Punch have selected as the most comprehensive motto for the case in which they exhibit copies of their various publications a sentence from Shakspeare:  “Come and take choice of all my library, and so beguile thy sorrow.”  We do not know that to dull his sorrows is all that can be done for man.  Literature assumes to do more than make him forget.  The lotos-eater is not its one hero.  School-books, piled aloft “in numbers without number numberless,” may to the man be suggestive of hours without thought and void of grief, but they certainly are not to the boy.  Blue books, ground out in a thousand bureaus, and contributed in like profusion, may be pronounced a weariness to the adult flesh, however sweet their ultimate uses.  Unhappy those who wade through them for increasing the happiness of others!  These humble but portly representatives of political literature are the log-books of the ship of state.  They chart and chronicle the currents and winds along its course, so that from the mass of chaff a grain of guidance may be painfully winnowed out for the benefit of its next voyage, or for the voyages of other craft floundering on the same perilous and baffling sea.  Everything comes pat to a log-book.  As endless is the medley of memoranda in blue-books.  They deal, like government itself, with everything.  They take up the citizen on his entry into the cradle, and do not quite drop him at the grave.  How to educate, clothe, feed and doctor him; how to keep him out of jail, and how, once there, to get him out again with the least possible moral detriment; how to adjust as lightly as possible to his shoulders the burden of taxation; how to economize him as food for powder; and how to free him from the miasm of crowded cities,—­are but a small part of their contents.  And the index is growing, if possible, larger, as the apparatus of government becomes more and more intricate.  With such contributions and credentials do the rulers of the nations enroll themselves in the guild of authorship.  They are proud of them, and exhibit them in profusion, in whole libraries, rich with gold and the primary colors.