A young lady writes to me from a western city and encloses her photograph, which shows her to be a blooming, chubby-cheeked beauty of eighteen summers. She says, in her letter, she is studying very hard and sitting up night after night until daybreak, reading all the great authors of our era: E. P. Roe, Edward W. Bok, Richard Harding Davis and Dr. J. G. Holland, with the intention of adopting literature as a career. These are all truly “great masters,” and their selection shows an unerring judgment in one contemplating a career in _American_ contemporary literature. I made the mistake of choosing certain obscure Elizabethans and seventeenth century Englishmen as my masters; and so have never got out of Grub Street. A woman can scarcely offend against the canons of morality if she models her ideals of fictitious propriety after the examples of these litterateurs who have made simpering the grace and distinction of our epoch. It was unkind of fate to deny these great minds the innocency of petticoats, but they have remained wonderfully unspotted from the world. They have reduced all morality to etiquette. But I am afraid my young lady will spoil her beauty with all this strain to rid her mind of original predilections after the manner of these “masters,” and she may develop that shocking severity of countenance, which is so appallingly rife among our female moralists in any illustrated book catalogue. All women are beautiful, of course; but those who try to look like seers in their photographs usually look as if life were a perpetual washing day with them. It seems that scribbling often fatally undermines geniality in the female temperament, and indeed most women write novels because they lack a sense of humor. This severe superciliousness of our female celebrities, I hold, is a warning to the New Woman to cultivate flippant male society as much as possible. I warn my correspondent not to grow a face that appals young love and stops clocks. The _Arena_ should not hide its light under a bushel. It should put out a sign, “Worlds reformed while you wait!” The actress who finds herself too fat to be cast for the heroine (heroines are always slender) and has to thin down upon a diet of nothing but beef tea and hot water with a squeeze of lemon in it for three months, buys fame almost as dearly as do the poets. Ambition seems to have a trick of cheating the stomach; but asceticism and mortification of the flesh on the stage have strangely enough made their belated appearance with the advent of The Woman who Did. The great trouble with human nature is that it is everywhere. If it were only confined like a mad dog and rampaged solely in one country or continent, we could take ideal views of life. And we could be patriots without being scoundrels. To the sentimental: Please do not forget that it was Dr. Johnson and not the writer who said “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” THE LONDON ACADEMY