I attribute this too frequent monotony, and even stultification of composition, to the “literary reviser”—the trail of the serpent is over all our press. And what does this literary revision offer for the large fees paid? One alleged benefit is the correction of punctuation. It certainly performs this service; but the editor and proofreader in any responsible publishing-house will, as a duty, correct with precision the punctuation of any paper or book printed by the house. A benefit alleged by one circular is “a pruning of too riotous imagination.” I groaned aloud as I read this threat. Too riotous imagination to-day! when we long for imagination and long in vain; when a wooden realism thrusts its angular outlines in our faces from every printed page. “To curb the use of adjectives” is another of the reviser’s duties. The meagre style too often seen of late may arise from this curbing. The most astonishing aspect of this bureau of revision is shown in the patience with which authors endure its devastations. They confidingly send into this machine the tenderly nourished children of their brains, dressed with natural affection in all the frills and ruffles of rhetoric, and receive them home again with ornaments torn away, laid in a strait-jacket which has been cut with rigid uniformity, and made with mathematical precision—and yet they kiss the rod that turned the natural children of their brains into wretched little automatons. I would not judge all revision bureaus by one; but I must give my experience at the hands of a very reputable one. I had written four books of more than average sale, and had been ever commended by the press for my grammatical construction, when I sent to a bureau for criticism a short magazine-paper. It was returned to me full of very large and legible corrections—or rather alterations such as these: Where I wrote of my heroine being _dressed in_, etc., my reviser placed _gowned in_; where I wrote _the little child_, the reviser altered to _the young babe_; where I said _nothing happened after this_, to my horror, in heroic blue-pencilled letters, I read my pet aversion, _nothing transpired_. Where a compound sentence contained several clauses with verbs in the past tense, all dependent clauses were made participial in form; not always to the advantage in elegance, never of moment or indeed of real difference in grammatical construction. I must confess that I did not send to this bureau my real name, as palpably too well known to men of literary ilk. My three dollars’ worth of advice was contained in a single sentence: “Your style is fair, but commonplace; if you practise literary composition you may succeed; but this article is, in our judgment, not salable.” I had the pleasure of sending the paper immediately to a well-known magazine and receiving therefrom in payment a check for fifty dollars. Mr. Meredith and his Aminta _By_ Lewis E. Gates MR. MEREDITH AND HIS AMINTA