If the book be sent as a present, the crime is less black, though still very culpable.  You need take no notice of the present, whereby you probably offend the author for life, and thus get rid of him anyhow.  Commonly, he is a minor poet, and sends you his tragedy on John Huss; or he is a writer on mythological subjects, and is anxious to weary you with a theory that Jack the Giant Killer was Julius Caesar.  At the worst, you can toss his gift into the waste-paper basket, or sell it for fourpence three-farthings, or set it on your bookshelf so as to keep the damp away from books of which you are not the Involuntary Bailee, but the unhappy purchaser.  The case becomes truly black, as we have said, when the uncalled-for tribute has to be returned.  Then it is sure to be lost, when the lender writes to say he wishes to recover it.  In future he will go about telling people that the recipient stole his best ideas from the manuscript (if it was a manuscript) which he pretends to have lost.

Lord Tennyson has suffered from all these troubles to an extent which the average Bailee can only fancy by looking with his mind’s eye through “patent double million magnifiers.”  A man so eminent as the Laureate is the butt of all the miserable minor poets, all the enthusiastic school-girls, all the autograph-hunters, all the begging-letter writers, all the ambitious young tragedians, and all the utterly unheard-of and imaginary relations in Kamschatka or Vancouver’s Island with whom the wide world teems.  Lord Tennyson has endured these people for some fifty years, and now he takes a decided line.  He will not answer their letters, nor return their manuscripts.

Lord Tennyson is perfectly right to assume this attitude, only it makes life even more hideous than of old to Mr. Browning and Mr. Swinburne.  Probably these distinguished writers are already sufficiently pestered by the Mr. Tootses of this world, whose chief amusement is to address epistles to persons of distinction.  Mr. Toots was believed to answer his own letters himself, but the beings who fill Lord Tennyson’s, and Mr. Gladstone’s, and probably Mr. Browning’s letterbox expect to receive answers.  Frightened away from Lord Tennyson’s baronial portals, they will now crowd thicker than ever round the gates of other poets who have not yet announced that they will prove irresponsive.  Cannot the Company of Authors (if that be the correct style and title) take this matter up and succour the profession?  Next, of course, to the baneful publisher and the hopelessly indifferent public, most authors suffer more from no one than from the unknown correspondent.  The unknown correspondent is very frequently of the fair sex, and her bright home is not unusually in the setting sun.  “Dear Mr. Brown,” she writes to some poor author who never heard of her, nor of Idaho, in the States, where she lives, “I cannot tell you how much I admire your monograph on Phonetic Decay in its influence on Logic.  Please send me two copies with autograph inscriptions.  I hope to see you at home when I visit Europe in the Fall.”