"Your dinner didn't agree with you, apparently," said Bolton, as he looked up from a new scientific work he was patiently analyzing, making careful notes along the margin; "however, turn those books over to Jim, who understands the hop, skip, and jump style of criticism. Jim has about a dozen or two of blank forms that only need the name of the book and publisher inserted, and the work is done." "What a perfect farce," said I. "The notices are as good as the books," said Bolton. "Something has to be said to satisfy the publishers and do the handsome thing by them; and the usual string of commendatory phrases and trite criticism, which mean nothing in particular, I presume imposes upon nobody. It is merely a form of announcing that such and such wares are in the market. I fancy they have very little influence on public opinion." "But do you think," said I, "that there is any hope of a just school of book criticism--something that should be a real guide to buyers and readers, and a real instruction to writers?" "That is a large question," said Bolton, "and a matter beset with serious difficulties. While books are a matter of commerce and trade; while magazines which criticise books are the property of booksellers, and newspapers depend on them for advertising patronage, it is too much to expect of human nature, that we should always get wholly honest, unbiassed opinions. Then, again, there is the haste, and rush, and hurry of our times, the amount of literary drift-wood that is all the while accumulating! Editors and critics are but mortal men, and men kept, as a general thing, in the last agonies of weariness and boredom. There is not, for the most part, sensibility enough left to enable them to read through or enter into the purport of one book in a hundred; yet, for all this, you do observe here and there in the columns of our best papers carefully studied and seriously written critiques on books; these are hopeful signs. They show a conscientious effort on the part of the writers to enter into the spirit of the work, and to give their readers a fair account of it; and, if I mistake not, the number of such is on the increase." "Well," said I, "do you suppose there is any prospect or possibility of a _constructive_ school of criticism--honest, yet kindly and sympathetic, that shall lead young authors into right methods of perfecting themselves?" "We have a long while to wait before that comes," said Bolton. "Who is appreciative and many-sided enough to guide the first efforts of genius just coming to consciousness? How many could profitably have advised Hawthorne when his peculiar Rembrandt style was just forming? As a race, we Anglo Saxons are so self-sphered that we lack the power to enter into the individuality of another mind, and give profitable advice for its direction.