I have heard people express surprise that such a born romantist as John Buchan has turned his mind successfully to practical business, and been for so long an active partner in the great publishing house of Thomas Nelson & Sons. But there is really nothing at all surprising about that. One of the essays in his “Some Eighteenth Century Byways” speaks of “the incarnation of youth and the eternal Quixotic which, happily for Scotland, lie at the back of all her thrift and prudence”; and in another, on “Mr. Balfour as a Man of Letters”, he says, “the average Scot, let it never be forgotten, is incorrigibly sentimental; at heart he would rather be ‘kindly’ and ‘innerly’ than ‘canny,’ and his admiration is rather for Burns, who had none of the reputed national characteristics, than for Adam Smith, who had them all.” He adds that though Scotsmen perfectly understand the legendary Caledonian, though “in theory they are all for dry light ‘a hard, gem-like flame,’ in practice they like the glow from more turbid altars.” Having that dual personality himself, it is not incongruous that John Buchan should be at once a poet, a romantic and a shrewd man of affairs. But he is wrong in thinking the nature he sketches is peculiar to his countrymen, the Scots; it is as characteristically English. Indeed, I should not count him among practical men if he had not proved himself one by doing more practical things than publishing; for publishing is essentially a romantic calling as you may suspect if you consider the number of authors who have taken to it, and the number of publishers who have become authors. Scott felt the lure of the trade, in the past, and in the present you have J. D. Beresford working at it with Collins & Sons; Frank Swinnerton first with Dent, now with Chatto & Windus; Frederick Watson, a brilliant writer of romances and of modern social comedy, with Nisbet; Michael Sadleir with Constable; C. E. Lawrence, most fantastic and idealistic of novelists, with John Murray; Roger Ingram, writing with authority on Shelley and making fine anthologies, but disguised as one of the partners in Selwyn and Blount; Alec Waugh, joining that admirable essayist his father, Arthur Waugh, with Chapman & Hall; C. S. Evans, whose “Nash and Others” may stand on the shelf by Kenneth Grahame’s “Golden Age,” with Heinemanns; B. W. Matz, the Dickens enthusiast and author of many books about him, running in harness with Cecil Palmer; you have Grant Richards writing novels that are clever enough to make some of his authors wonder why he publishes theirs; Sir Ernest Hodder-Williams, an author, with at least half-a-dozen successful books to his name; Herbert Jenkins, a popular humorist and doing sensational detective stories; Sir Algernon Methuen developing a passion for compiling excellent anthologies of poetry--and there are others.