I received a book the other day from one of the leading publishers for review, and for three days and nights I have labored with it. It is one of those dull and dreary affairs, without even the single redeeming grace of conscious striving egotism, and it is written by one of the most prominent members of the New York Scratchback Club, a man whose name is in everybody’s mouth in the country. I wrote a scorching review of the book, in my happiest vein of gory glee; but upon reflection I shall not print it. This author is too infernally stupid to deserve so good an “ad.” The poets are not the only sufferers in these sober strenuous days, in which the beautiful distractions of idleness are not properly understood or appreciated. Full many a wag is born to waste his wit upon the desert air--or the thick skull of an anthropoid on the “night desk.” It has been suggested by an undiscouraged friend of humanity that, at the close of the Age of Consent discussion, a committee should be organized among the society women who live in the highly fashionable locality in Boston that is honored with the presence of Mrs. Helen H. Gardener, to raise necessary funds to defray the cost of giving the sources of this lady’s literary inspiration a good Spring cleaning. He urges, and with some apparent show of reason, that after her arduous labors as the historian of the Age of Consent movement, Mrs. Gardener cannot wait until spring, and her consent should be sought at an early date. Mrs. Gardener is well known as a sort of social tornado in fiction, though I believe she claims to belong to the Red Cross or Sanitary school of writers. She is, anyhow, the head and front of the inodorous infliction called the Age of Consent agitation, and the author of that delightfully aromatic literary confection--you should read it held off in a pair of tongs--“Is this your son, my Lord?” We can say with _empressement_, no, thank God! This particular kind of pathological fiction is only possible to a certain haunted, morbid feminine imagination. Hall Caine tells young authors that when they are tempted to describe a scene of more than usual delicacy to refrain from it, if it is not absolutely necessary to the story. What about writing your story around a delicate situation, as Shakespeare did in “The Rape of Lucrece”? A delicate situation, delicately expressed, requires more talent than an indelicate one indelicately described.