It is offenders only who are to be deemed worthy of Reviews in these columns and as the worst possible offence of which they can be guilty, since it includes all specific or lesser faults, is the bare fact of their existence in type, it will be our aim to hold up to the merited scorn of an outraged world the responsible progenitors of such unblessed offspring, the Publisher, and his partner in sin, the Author of the book. In thus reversing that order in criminality which has hitherto obtained in the assizes of criticism we are moved by the consideration among others: the writing of any book, good or bad, is a matter of concern to its author alone so long as it remains in manuscript. Its merits or demerits have alike no existence to the public; however shameless its morals, feeble its plot or intolerable its dullness these are all equally powerless for mischief so long as it has not been put into type and launched upon a much suffering, helpless world. Then its career of evil begins. For this the Publisher is solely responsible; he and he alone is able to remedy the abuses which have long been calling out to heaven for suppression, by setting up some sort of standard as to the minimum of those defects which shall bar any manuscript whatever from his favorable consideration. What this minimum ought to be we shall take pleasure in enlightening him from time to time in these pages. It may be urged that the weapon of scorn has been used and abused time out of mind; we reply that the objector is in error in one essential. The dart is an old one indeed, but its point has been blunted, not in the fattening tissues of this chief offender but on the scantily clad bones of his weaker accomplice, the much-abused author. In issuing an illegitimate book the Author is the victim of the sweetest and most pathetic fallacy known to men: _he believes his work is good_; while the publisher knows better. One is animated by love and nature, the other has only a lust for dollars. In such offenses as we are discussing, no less than in certain others needing no more explicit designation, it is not the deed itself but its exposure which calls forth the protests of a PHILISTINE public. Those Little Sisters in Sin, _A Superfluous Woman_ and _Bessie Costrell_ might have faded to oblivion in their swaddling clothes had no publisher been found to expose them to daylight. It will be understood therefore that our column of Reviews exists, not to aid struggling authors or enterprising publishers to launch their craft upon the already crowded ocean of Literature, but as the Pillory where manifest culprits are exposed to the jibes of the crowd, to the end that others who are meditating like deeds may be warned by such penalty to desist. Nor need the idle stocks ever yawn in emptiness so long as upon his right hand and his left a man beholds such a richness of backs itching for the lash.