‘Who set you up as a judge over us?’ they cry testily, when they are told by a perfect stranger that they ought not to like what they do like, and ought to like what they go to sleep over. Schopenhauer, a man who hated much, in his ‘Parerga,’ fervently desires a literary journal which ‘should be a dam against the unconscionable scribbling of the age, the everlasting deluge of bad and useless books.’ He proceeds (I am quoting from Mr. Saunders’ translation): ‘If there were such a paper as I mean, every bad writer, every brainless compiler, every plagiarist from others’ books, every hollow and incapable place-hunter, every sham philosopher, every vain and languishing poetaster, would shudder at the prospect of the pillory in which his bad work would inevitably have to stand soon after publication.’ It is an animated passage, and reeks of the shambles. How awkward for poor so-and-so! one murmurs whilst reading. But even were the thing possible, I demur to the ferocity. There is no need to be so angry. A dishonest and lazy plumber does more harm in a week than all the poetasters of the Christian era. But the thing is not possible, as the robust sense of Schopenhauer made plain to him. He goes on: ‘The ideal journal could, to be sure, be written only by people who joined incorruptible honesty with rare knowledge and still rarer power of judgment, so that, perhaps, there could, at the very most, be one, _and even hardly one_, in the whole country; but there it would stand, like a just Areopagus, every member of which would have to be elected by all the others.’ Who, I wonder, would elect the first member of this just Ruin? He would, I suppose, be nominated by the subscribers of the necessary capital, and would then proceed to gather round him, were his terms better than his quarters, the gang we all know so well, incorruptible as Robespierre, not quite so learned as Selden, and with powers of judgment which can only be described as varying. It is of course obvious that no journal, be its contributors who they may, can exercise criminal jurisdiction over bad or stupid authors. The hue and cry has before now been raised at the heels of a popular author, but always to the great enrichment of the rascal. The reading community owes no allegiance, and pays no obedience, to the critical journals, who, if they really want to injure an author, and deprive him of his little meed of contemporary praise and profit, should leave him severely alone. To refer to him is to advertise him.