The time never was when a new work appeared to the world without some external circumstance to modify for good or ill its early reputation. Even the "anonymous" early ballads must have depended at first in some measure upon the impression of "good time" which lingered in the minds of the junketers among whom they sprang up. Even the _Iliad_ or the _Song of Roland_ must have gained or lost according to the effectiveness of the reciter or the social status of the patron. And to-day it is a thousand times truer than ever before, that at the start the genuine fame which endures is bound up with much that is purely factitious. A new book comes to birth and finds a waiting world to welcome, but not impartial in its attitude. Have not the friends and family announced the arrival in joyful and ringing tones? Advertiser and advance reviewer have been busy; the publisher now-a-days is preëminently efficient. The result is a sort of pre-natal notoriety built up regardless of real worth. The advertising campaign may be likened to an attack by gas-bombs on the reading public; but fortunately from long experience a large part of the public has provided itself with a tolerably good supply of masks to receive the assault, and--to finish the figure with all possible despatch--"waits till the clouds roll by." Then for the first time, the work gradually emerges for what it is worth. The public reads and judges; recommends it to its friends, or warns them off; and speaks the fateful word, which if it is favorable, leads others to read, and at least makes strangers admit that the book is "well spoken of." Here is real fame, still struggling for existence, yet independent of the handicaps of early puffing. Yet it must be said in all fairness that the early puffing, with its manufactured audience, hastens for the good book the chance for genuine fame; and makes more decisive the collapse of the poor book, by bringing sooner to proof the pinchbeck prophecies.