I tendered as floriated and declamatory a farewell expression of gratitude as my dull tongue could command to my city authority, who was, I am led to believe from the tablet on the office from which he emerged, a common councilman, but who might have been a score of glorious aldermen distilled and expressed and condensed into one, so rotund, so ruby-colored, so shining, so truly grand was he, so elegant, albeit loose, of attire, so glittering with gold and precious stones. As I thanked him in phrases sadly etiolated in comparison with his own glowing pauses, “Madam,” said he, “are you satisfied, and may I ask your name and residence?” “You may,” said I, “I came to study history, and I was sent to the Satisfaction Clerk, and I found satisfaction, though not in the wonted legal form.” “But ye haven’t told me yer name,” said he. “I have not,” said I; “good day.” The Bureau of Literary Revision _By_ Alice Morse Earle THE BUREAU OF LITERARY REVISION OUR beloved friend Charles Lamb once wrote of his Essays of Elia:— “One of these professors, on my complaining that these little sketches of mine were anything but methodical, and that I was unable to make them otherwise, kindly offered to instruct me on the method by which the young gentlemen in his seminary were taught to compose English themes.” When, with the solemn thoughts brought to each soul at the “turn of the year,” we recount to ourselves our many mercies, let us never fail to remember with gratitude that the magnanimous offer of that seminary professor was never accepted. We do not have to wait to-day for chance offers from solemn professors of instruction and revision in literary composition; “the method by which young gentlemen in the seminary are taught to compose” is thrust upon us at every hand. “Bureaus of revision” and “Offices of literary criticism” abound and thrive and become opulent through examining, correcting, and revising the work of confiding authors. We are told with pride that in one bureau alone three thousand manuscripts a year were thus revised. Among those three thousand young fledglings of authors there may _not_ have been a Charles Lamb, but the lamentable thought also will arise that there _may_ have been a Charles Lamb, and that his unmethodical little “sketches” may have been pruned or amplified, or arranged and revised till they proved true “English themes.” There is a wearying monotony in the make-up of many of our periodicals, some of those even of large circulation. There is a lack of literary color, a precise and proper formation of each sentence, and a regularity of ensemble which is certainly grammatical but is fully as uninteresting as grammar. A surfeit of these exactly formal “English themes” has made the gasping public turn to some of our literary freaks and comets with a sensation as if seeking an inspiration of fresh air after mental smothering.