It was, I think, Mr. Clyde Fitch who first voiced the complaint that our drama is seriously affected by the demand of “the tired business man” to be amused at the theatre. The same may be said of fiction. A very considerable number of our toiling millions sit down wearily at night, and if the evening paper does not fully satisfy or social diversion offer, a story that will hold the attention without too great a tax upon the mind is welcomed. I should be happy to think that our ninety millions trim the lamp every evening with zest for “improving” literature; but the tired brain follows the line of least resistance, which unfortunately does not lead to alcoves where the one hundred best books wear their purple in solemn pomp. Even in my present mood of contrition, I am not sneering at that considerable body of my countrymen who have laid one dollar and eighteen cents upon the counter and borne home my little fictions. They took grave chances of my boring them; and when they rapped a second time on the counter and murmured another of my titles, they were expressing a confidence in me which I strove hard never to betray. No one will, I am sure, deny me the satisfaction I have in the reflection that I put a good deal of sincere work into those stories,--for they are stories, not novels, and were written frankly to entertain; that they are not wholly ill-written; that they contain pages that are not without their grace; or that there is nothing prurient or morbid in any of them. And no matter how jejune stories of the popular romantic type may be,--a fact, O haughty critic, of which I am well aware,--I take some satisfaction as a good American in the knowledge that, in spite of their worthlessness as literature, they are essentially clean. The heroes may be too handsome, and too sure of themselves; the heroines too adorable in their sweet distress, as they wave the white handkerchief from the grated window of the ivied tower,--but their adventures are, in the very nature of things, _in usum Delphini_. Some of my friends of the writing guild boast that they never read criticisms of their work. I have read and filed all the notices of my stories that bore any marks of honesty or intelligence. Having served my own day as reviewer for a newspaper, I know the dreary drudgery of such work. I recall, with shame, having averaged a dozen books an afternoon; and some of my critics have clearly averaged two dozen, with my poor candidates for oblivion at the bottom of the heap! Much American criticism is stupid or ignorant; but the most depressing, from my standpoint, is the flippant sort of thing which many newspapers print habitually. The stage, also, suffers like treatment, even in some of the more reputable metropolitan journals. Unless your book affords a text for a cynical newspaper “story,” it is quite likely to be ignored.