JULY 16, 1918. I was looking in a hurry for something to read. One magazine on the bookstall told me it was exactly what I wanted for a railway journey. It had a picture of a large gun to make its cover attractive. The next advertised its claims in another way. A girl's face was the decorative feature of its wrapper, and you could not imagine eyes and a simper more likely to make a man feel holier than Bernard of Cluny till your gaze wandered to the face of the girl smirking from the magazine beyond. Is it possible that nobody reads current English literature, as the magazines give it, except the sort of men who collect golf balls and eat green gooseberries? It seems like it. One wonders what the editors of those magazines read when they are on a railway journey. For it would be interesting to know whether this sort of thing is done purposely, like glass beads for Africa, or whether it is the gift of heaven, natural and unconscious, like chickweed. One would be grateful for direction in this. The matter is of some importance, because either the producers or the readers are in a bad way; and it would be disheartening to suppose it is the readers, for probably there are more readers than editors, and so less chance of a cure. I do not want to believe it is the readers. It is more comforting to suppose those poor people must put up with what they can get in a hurry ten minutes before the train starts, only to find, as they might have guessed, that vacuity is behind the smirk of a girl with a face like that. They are forced to stuff their literature behind them, so that ownership of it shall not openly shame them before their fellow-passengers. With several exceptions, the mass of English magazines and reviews may be dismissed in a few seconds. The exceptions usually are not out yet, or one has seen them. It used not to be so, and that is what makes me think it is the producers, and not the readers, who require skilled attention. It is startling to turn to the magazines of twenty or thirty years ago, and to compare them with what is thought good enough for us. I was looking through such a magazine recently, and found a poem by Swinburne, a prose-romance by William Morris, and much more work of a quality you would no more expect to find in a current magazine than you would palm trees in Whitechapel.