Is it not better to hit your hundred than to aim at your million and miss it? That is a problem which I do not think it possible to answer by a general rule. We rightly honour the Carlyle or the Wordsworth who has forced the public to admire him in spite of critical gibes and long obscurity; but we must not forget that even success does not necessarily justify the audacity which has won it, and that a good many people who fancied themselves to be capable of enlightening the world have been empty-headed impostors who would have done better to take the critic's advice: drop their pens and mind their gallipots. Devotion to an ideal, like other high qualities, may be misplaced or counterfeited by mere personal vanity. But leaving each man to decide by the concrete circumstances of his own case, I still hold that at least we should try in this respect to act in Carlyle's spirit. I cannot blame the author who, under certain conditions, feels that his first duty is to pay his weekly bills, so long, of course, as he does not earn the money by pandering to the bad passions of his readers; for there are modes of making a livelihood by the pen to which starvation or the workhouse would be preferred by any high-minded man. But we will not judge harshly of the author who lives by supplying innocent, if rather insipid, food for public amusement. He might be capable of better things; but, then, he might certainly be doing much worse. Yet in any case, I say that, to have a tolerably comfortable conscience, an author should try to look a little farther than this. The great mass of mankind has to devote most of its energies to employments which require nothing more than honest work; and yet even the humblest can do something to maintain and elevate the moral standard of his surroundings. The author, so far as he is simply a journeyman, a reporter of ordinary events and speeches, for example, does his duty so far as he reports them honestly; and we have no more to say to him. But the author who takes part in political and social or religious discussions has a responsibility which involves something more. Probably he feels--I am sure enough that I feel--that his performance makes remarkably little difference to mankind in general; and that he is playing only an infinitesimal part in the great processes by which the huge world blunders along, struggling into some approximation to a more tolerable order. He may compare himself to one of the myriads of insects building up one square yard on the coral reef which stretches for hundreds of leagues. Yet even the coral reef depends on the units, and if the insect's powers are small it concerns him to make the best of them. Now, to make the best of them implies some genuine interest in his work; something that makes the reader perceive that he is being addressed by a human being, not a mere machine for vamping up old materials. I have been struck in reading newspaper