So far as one can judge, a very small part of contemporaneous writing has literary excellence in any degree. But a similarly small portion of the writing of any age has had lasting excellence; and more men and women, more kinds of men and women, are to-day expressing themselves in print than ever in the world before. Since no one person has to read many books, the world is not unduly burdened with them; it can read, classify, and reject or preserve all that the presses are capable of putting forth. “The trash with which the press now groans” was foolish cant a hundred years ago, when Jane Austen satirically quoted it.[7] And it is more threadbare now than it was then. There are alive to-day a goodly company of competent writers of novels; I could name ten. I believe, too, that there are genuine poets, though we do not dare name young poets until they are dead. History and biography are, regarded as a collective institution, in flourishing state, though, to be sure, the work of art in those departments of literature as in poetry and fiction, appears none too frequently. It is our part to join in the work of that great critic, the World, encourage the good and discourage the bad, and help make the best book the “best seller.” It would be foolish to hope for that ideal condition in which only authors of ability should write books. “Were angels to write, I fancy we should have but few folios.” But writing is a human affair, and human labor is necessarily wasteful. We have to endure the printing of a hundred poor books and we have to support a score of inferior writers in order to get one good book and give one talented writer a part of his living. Thousands of machines are built and thrown away before the Wrights make one that will fly, and they could not make theirs if other men had not tried and in large part failed, bequeathing them a little experience. A hundred men for a hundred years contributed to the making of Bell’s telephone. We do not grudge the wasted machines, the broken apparatus in the laboratory. So, too, when hundreds of minor poets print their little books and suffer heartache and disappointment for the sake of the one volume of verse that shows genius, we need not groan amid the whir of the presses; we need only contemplate with sympathy and understanding the pathetic losses and brave gains of human endeavor. Numberless books must be born and die in order that the one or two may live. We shall try to ignore the minor versifier as gently as possible, to suppress the cheap novelist as firmly as we can, and give our dollar for the good book when we think we have found it.