There are several gentlemen now earning a fair living by feeding public curiosity and battening on the fame of its darlings. They do it by seeking out a celebrity and retailing his unconsidered trifles of talk at a good market price. When they do it maliciously, as some do by making merry with the great man’s moustache or sneering at his wife, they are really doing the literary public a service, for they act as a warning and, indeed, point a moral. They and their works say to the enthusiast: If you would be happy, avoid the company of your favourite authors or you will be speedily disillusioned, and either preserve a cynical silence for the rest of your time or make capital out of your misery by falling into our unsavoury practices. It is possible, of course, to meet a few authors without wishing to do so. A good many of them go out a great deal nowadays, and some move in very decent society, so that there is no knowing when and where one may meet an author or two. At any moment, one or other of us may be faced with what appears to be a pair of overfed, pompous merchants or manufacturers, only to learn, on being introduced, that while one of them, Mr. Dash of Dot & Dash, Leadenhall Street, is the real thing, his companion is no other than Mr. Blank, the mystical poet. But to encounter authors in this way is no great matter; there is no need to reveal the fact that one knows anything about them. If they happen to be men whose work is good, some disappointment may attend the encounter, but it will only be slight, for we can afford to be amused when the meeting is accidental and we have not deliberately asked to be disillusioned. But if we are decoyed by a naive enthusiasm into seeking out our men, it is almost certain that we shall be grievously disappointed, and it is more than likely that our admiration for their work will soon be on the wane. Knowing the men, we may pretend to admire them more than ever; most of us do; but it hardly deceives anybody, and certainly not ourselves, who are left with the unpleasant thought that we have thus cut down our own pleasures.