“I will give you two hundred and fifty dollars if you will write a laudatory review of my book,” he offered. “Have you ever dealt in consciences, Mr. Whitely?” I asked. “Occasionally.” “Did you ever get any as cheap as that?” “Many.” “I’m afraid you were buying shopworn and second-hand articles,” I retorted; “or you may have gone to some bargain counter where they make a specialty of ninety-eight and forty-nine cent goods.” He never liked this satirical mood into which he sometimes drove me. He hesitated an instant, and then bid, “Three hundred.” “This reminds me of Faust,” I remarked; but he was too intent on the matter in hand to see the point. “I suppose it’s only a question of amount?” he suggested blandly. “You are quite right, Mr. Whitely. I will write you that review if you will pay me my price,” I assented. “I knew it,” he asserted exultingly. “But you are mistaken if you think I will pay any fancy price.” “Then it’s a waste of time to talk any more about it,” I answered, and resumed my work. “It isn’t worth three hundred, even,” he argued, “but you may tell me what you will do it for.” “I will write that review for one hundred and twenty-one thousand dollars,” I replied. “What!” “And from that price I will not abate one cent,” I added. Strangely enough, I did not write the notice. It was amusing to see his eagerness for the criticisms of the book. The three American critical journals had notices eminently characteristic of them. The first was scholarly, praising moderately, with a touch of lemon-juice in the final paragraph that really only heightened its earlier commendation, but which made the book’s putative author wince; the second was discriminating and balanced, with far more that was complimentary; while the third was the publisher’s puff so regularly served up,—a colorless, sugary mush,—which my employer swallowed with much delectation. I am ashamed to say that I greatly enjoyed his pain over any harsh words. He always took for granted that the criticisms were correct, never realizing that as between an author, who has spent years on a book, and the average critic, who is at best superficial in his knowledge of a subject, the former is the more often right of the two. I tried to make this clear to him one day by asking him if he had never read Lord Brougham’s review of Byron or Baron Jeffrey’s review of Coleridge, and even brought him the astonishing tirades of those world-renowned critics; but it was time wasted. He preferred a flattering panegyric in the most obscure of little sheets to a really careful notice which praised less inordinately; yet while apparently believing all the flattery, he believed all the censoriousness as well, even in those cases known to every author where one critic praises what another blames. “A Western paper says you do not know how to write English,” he complained one day. “You ought to have taken more pains with the book, Dr. Hartzmann.”