Elbert Hubbard, editor of _The Philistine_, founder and owner of the Roycroft Shop in East Aurora, New York, is the most recent and unique development in the lecture field. [Illustration] I wish that I were able to write of Mr. Hubbard as I should like, but as I cannot, I shall say nothing. He says it himself. I have read so many nice things of him in _The Philistine_, a few of them reprints from other papers, that I think the entire eulogistic field is exhausted. I am one of the subscribers who pay for those puffs that he prints about himself. Notwithstanding all that, he is doing a mighty good work, and he is also letting the public into the secret about himself for a consideration. Not long ago he wrote me: “If I get down to business here and cut off all distractions, I can make a name equal to John Ruskin’s or Thomas Carlyle’s. _I can do it_, but I must keep out of sight in order to succeed. To merely talk is not to succeed, and the public is only a devil that takes a man to the top of the mountain and then casts him on the stones beneath. So make no more lecture engagements for me.” And so the lecture-going public will never know what it has lost. Good luck to you, Elbert! A high ambition is the chief spur to success. Mr. Hubbard has received great praise for many of his “Little Journeys to the Homes of Famous People,” and many of them are truly delightful; but, of course, visiting so many of these, he has been obliged to travel in all sorts of weather and at all seasons of the year. He must have visited the home of Robert Burns just at the breaking up of a hard winter or the opening up of spring, else his tracks could never have thrown up so much mud. The proportionate success of Hubbard to some of the other men of the platform may be inferred from _The Philistine_ for April, 1900, where he says: “The week before I was in Des Moines, Dean Stubbs exploited an audience in the same church. Stubbs had one hundred people; I had a thousand, with just $500 in the box office, that’s all. About an hour after the lecture the chairman of the committee snipped a clove, and declared that Stubbs wasn’t in it with me--a proposition I did not argue.” In a later number of _The Philistine_ Mr. Hubbard went on to say: “I see that Dean Stubbs of Ely is out with a letter in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, denying that he ever said that Major Pond was the original David Harum. In this letter the Dean takes occasion to say his regard for the Major is very great, and further, that he fully endorses Hall Caine’s project of placing in Westminster Abbey a memorial tablet to Major Pond. The leading literary men of England and several American authors also have made contributions for the purpose mentioned. All those who contribute will have their names on the tablet, too, and beneath will be these words, ‘It is he that hath made us and not we ourselves.’”