In other words, the silly flattery of young women in search of autographs, and of mendacious reviewers who have manuscript to dispose of, has been sufficient to upset the mental equilibrium of this most excellent woman and leave her a victim of the Swelled Head, pitied by all who know her, and by none more than by her old associate of the poets’ bench, Henry Kornkrop, the modest and gifted author of the “Lady Gwendoline” romances. One more instance of Swelled Head and I am done. The case to which I refer is that of Mr. E. F. Benson, the author of _Dodo_, who has, I am credibly informed, been so overwhelmed with attentions from women of rank and fashion that his evenings are now fully occupied with social functions and he is unable to attend night-school. This is to be regretted, for Mr. Benson is by no means devoid of cleverness, and I am sure that in an institution of learning of the kind that I have named he would soon master such mysteries of syntax as the subjunctive mood, and at the same time vastly improve his style by constant study of such masterpieces of simple, direct English as, “Ho! the ox does go,” and “Lo! I do go up.” CHAPTER VIII. LITERATURE--PAWED AND UNPAWED; AND THE CROWN-PRINCE THEREOF. “See here!” cried a friend of mine the other day, “you’re always crying down the magazines, but I’ll bet you couldn’t write a magazine story to save your neck!” My dear boy, I never said I could write one--in fact, I am very sure I couldn’t; it’s all I can do to read them after the other people have written them. That is an infirmity which has, I am sure, interfered seriously with my labors as a critic--this inability to wade through everything that the magazine editors are kind enough to set before us. But I contrive to keep in touch with contemporary fiction by frequenting the Mercantile Library, where I can not only read and write undisturbed, but also take note of what others are reading and writing. And toward the close of each month I make it a point to arrive very early of a morning and take a superficial glance at the pages of the different periodicals, in order to gain an idea of the relative popularity of each one, and of the stories which they contain. When I find a story that is smeared with the grime of innumerable hands, or a magazine that has been torn almost to shreds by scores of eager readers, I retire to a corner and try to find out the cause of all the trouble. But this labor-saving system, excellent as it is in many ways, has its defects; and so it happened that I came very near missing one of the most charming stories that I have ever found in the pages of a magazine.