And yet on this particular evening I found the choice of a book by no means easy. I felt in no mood for a book that should deal exclusively with any one subject; and I searched unsuccessfully for the book that should pass casually, irresponsibly as conversation does, from one theme to another. I recalled the many evenings I have spent, tired after a day’s work or an afternoon’s football, talking, in a studio in Edwardes Square, of cricket and poetry, of life and literature and love; thinking how quickly the hours had passed as I lingered talking there. And there came back to me the memory of one particular evening when we had discussed the prospects of a new paper shortly to be presented to the world, in which we were jointly interested: Clifford Bax as editor, myself as publisher; I had been asked how happy I considered to be its prospects. But I disclaimed the rôle of prophet. “One can’t begin to guess,” I said; “a magazine is like a novel: it’s the expression of the editor’s personal taste. If the editor starts to include work he doesn’t like because he thinks it may succeed, he will fail as surely as the good novelist would fail if he tried to write a pot-boiler. It would be insincere. Think of _Tit-Bits_. There was a paper produced by a man who stated a fact and asked himself a question. A paper, he said, is a thing that a man wants to read when he’s tired at the end of the day. And the question he set himself was this: ‘What should I myself like to read under similar circumstances?’ He decided that _Tit-Bits_ was the sort of thing that he would like to read; and as he was the average man to the extent that he was miraculously in tune with the taste of the average man, _Tit-Bits_ was a big success. In the same way the success or failure of your paper will depend on the number of people who are sufficiently in harmony with your standard of taste to be prepared to increase their annual expenditure to the extent of one guinea. It is, it must always be, a pure gamble.” And I remember thinking that it was doubtless for this reason that the career of the literary periodical is so invariably short-lived. It is always the same thing. The paper is launched, fresh painted, with flags gaily fluttering. At the oars are to be seen renowned sailors: men who have ventured on noble hazards in the cause of letters. There is a shout of acclamation from the shore. “Never,” they say, “has a ship been launched under happier auspices. See how it cuts the waves! See how the oars rise and fall together! Of a surety it will win through safely to the fortunate islands.”