The one exception to the hunger for advertisement is the modern bard. He achieves his vogue by limited editions, and takes pains to prevent himself being an influence. He acquires a factitious fame and an artificial value by printing only a few copies, thus making his paper and print sought after rather than his matter. It is all very well for a book to become rare by the vicissitudes of literary fortune, but this machine-made rarity can only be prized by people who value their possessions merely because other people haven't got them. The old minor poet was frenzied and unbought; the new is calm and "collected." At this rate the greatest poets would be those of whose works only one copy is extant--in MS. Bend, bend the knee, and bow the head To reverence the great unread, The great unread and much-reviewed, Whose lines are treasured like the lewd, His first editions prizes reckoned Because there never was a second. Obscurely famous in his rut, Unknown, unpopular, "uncut," Where Byron thrilled a continent, To thrill an auction-room content, He struggles through oblivion's bogs, To gain a place in--catalogues! And falls asleep and joins the dust In simple hope and modest trust That, though Posterity neglect His bones, his books it will collect, And these will grow--O prospect fair!-- From year to year more "scarce" and "rare." [Sidenote: An Attack of Alliteration] Have you noticed the Renaissance of alliteration in the new journalism? The early English Poets made alliteration the chief element of their poetry, and in modern times Swinburne has paid more attention to it (and to rhyme) than to meaning, with the result that there has arisen a school of poets who don't mean anything--and say it. In the olden days, a bride was bonny, and was requested to busk herself in consequence; all of which was intelligible. Nowadays, the poet would call a basilisk bonny rather than miss his alliteration. Is it because the new journalism is so imaginative and emotional that it throws off alliterative phrases as naturally and unconsciously as Whittier confesses he did in writing "The Wreck of Rivermouth"? It is sometimes difficult to believe that providence is not on the side of the evening bills. When Balmaceda died he committed Suicide by Shooting himself in Santiago--of all places in the world. Boulanger, if from a local point of view he died less satisfactorily, was yet careful to employ a Bullet. It is for the sake of the phrase-makers that Burglars good-naturedly prefer Bermondsey, and that Tigers do not escape from their cages to play in Tragedies till the show arrives at Tewkesbury. The Baboon is already so largely alliterative in himself that it was an excess of generosity that made one recently attack an infant under such circumstances as to allow the report to be headed, "Baby Bitten by a Baboon in a Backyard at Bow." Alliteration has become a mighty factor in politics: it is fast replacing epigram, while