your novel, your drama, your collected trifles, from the shafts of their ridicule or the dust of their indifference. But do we owe any duty to contemporary authors? Clearly we are at liberty to talk about them and their ‘work’ as much as ever we choose--at dinner-tables, in libraries and smoking-rooms, in railway carriages (if we like shouting and do not mind being inaudible), in boats, at balls, in Courts of Justice, and other places, _ejusdem generis_, at Congresses (before, during, and after the speeches), and, indeed, everywhere and at all times, if we are so disposed and can find anybody to listen, or even to seem to listen, to us. Of this liberty we can never be deprived even by a veto of authors _ad hoc_, and, as already stated, the free exercise of it is a far more important constituent in the manufacture of literary opinion than printed notices of books. But though we are just as much entitled to express in conversation our delight in, or abhorrence of, a contemporary author as we are to bless or curse the weather, it cannot be said to be our duty to do so. No adult stands in a fiduciary relationship to another adult in the matter of his reading. If we like a book very much, it is only natural to say so; but if we do not like it, we may say so or hold our tongues as we choose. Suppose one dreamt (gentle reader, remember this is nothing but a dream) that there was one woebegone creature alive at this moment in this Britain of ours who cordially disliked, and shrank from, the poetry of Sir Edwin Arnold, Mr. Lewis Morris, and Mr. Alfred Austin, who could not away with ‘Robert Elsmere,’ ‘The Wages of Sin,’ or ‘Donovan,’ who abhorred the writings of Mrs. Lynn Linton, Archdeacon Farrar, and Mr. Shorthouse, who hated ‘Amiel’s Journal,’ ‘Marie Bashkirtseff,’ and ‘Little Lord Fauntleroy,’ who found it easy, and even helpful, to live for six months at a time without reading a new novel by Mr. Hall Caine or Mr. Black, who failed to respond to the careful and often-repeated raptures of those wise critics who assured him that the author of ‘Amos Barton’ and ‘Middlemarch’ cowers and crouches by the side of Mr. Hardy and Mr. Meredith; who, when he wants to laugh very heartily indeed, does not take down the works of---- But my list is long enough for a dream--could you honestly advise that man to run amuck in print against all these powerful and delightful writers? What good could come of it? The good people who like a writer will not like him or her any the less because you don’t. Reading is a democratic pursuit, else why are children taught it--very badly, no doubt--out of the rates? Sensible men and foolish men alike resent being dictated to about their contemporaries. They are willing to learn about the dead, but they crave leave to lay their own hands upon the living.