Criticism, however, it is to be feared, is a fight for a lost cause if it essays to prevent the founding of schools upon the faults of good writers. Criticism will never kill the copyist. Nothing but the end of the world can do that. Still, whatever the practical results of his work may be, it is the function of the critic to keep the standard of writing high--to insist that the authors shall write well, even if his own sentences are like torn strips of newspaper for commonness. He is the enemy of sloppiness in others--especially of that airy sloppiness which so often nowadays runs to four or five hundred pages in a novel. It was amazing to find with what airiness a promising writer like Mr. Compton Mackenzie gave us some years ago _Sinister Street_, a novel containing thousands of sentences that only seemed to be there because he had not thought it worth his while to leave them out, and thousands of others that seemed to be mere hurried attempts to express realities upon which he was unable to spend more time. Here is a writer who began literature with a sense of words, and who is declining into a mere sense of wordiness. It is simply another instance of the ridiculous rush of writing that is going on all about us--a rush to satisfy a public which demands quantity rather than quality in its books. I do not say that Mr. Mackenzie consciously wrote down to the public, but the atmosphere obviously affected him. Otherwise he would hardly have let his book go out into the world till he had rewritten it--till he had separated his necessary from his unnecessary sentences and given his conversations the tones of reality.