The reviews in the professional literary papers are still understood to be useful in the case of unknown writers. A young author without a friend, if he has merit, and above all if he has striking originality, is almost sure to attract the notice of some beneficent reviewer, and be praised in the columns of one or other of the leading weeklies. These are the circumstances under which the native kindliness of the irritable race is displayed most freely. The envy which sees merit in a new man and determines to crush it with silence or malignant attack, is inhuman, and practically, I fancy, scarcely exists. The entirely unheard-of writer wounds no susceptibilities, awakens no suspicions, and even excites a pleasurable warmth of patronage. It is a little later on, when the new man is quite new no longer, but is becoming a formidable rival, that evil passions are aroused, or sometimes seem to have been aroused, in pure literary bosoms. The most sincere reviews are often those which treat the works of unknown writers, and this is perhaps the reason why the shrewd public still permits itself to be moved by these when they are strongly favourable. At any rate, every new-comer must be introduced to our crowded public to be observed at all, and to new-comers the review is still the indispensable master of the ceremonies. But the power of reviews to create this form of literary reputation has of late been greatly circumscribed. The public grows less and less the dupe of an anonymous judgment, expressed in the columns of one of the too-numerous organs of public opinion. A more _naïve_ generation than ours was overawed by the nameless authority which moved behind a review. Ours, on the contrary, is apt to go too far, and pay no notice, because it does not know the name of a writer. The author who writhed under the humiliation of attack in a famous paper, little suspected that his critic was one Snooks, an inglorious creature whose acquaintance with the matter under discussion was mainly taken from the book he was reviewing. But, on the other hand, there is that story of the writer of some compendium of Greek history severely handled anonymously by the _Athenæum_, whose scorn of the nameless critic gave way to horror and shame when he discovered him to have been no other than Mr. Grote. On the whole, when we consider the careful, learned, and judicial reviews which are still to be found, like grains of salt, in the vast body of insipid criticism in the newspapers, it may be held that the public pays less attention to the reviews than it should. The fact seems to remain that, except in the case of entirely unknown writers, periodical criticism possesses an ever-dwindling power of recommendation.