prefer it to that of the generous but overtaxed donor. The project
would require a strong endowment, but that endowment might be of the
nature of a guarantee fund, and might in the end return unimpaired to
the lender. The suggestion is the establishment of a well-planned and
reasonably cheap monthly or weekly critical magazine, written on a
level at present unattainable--chiefly because of the low rate of
payment for all literary criticism. There can be no doubt among those
who read much among literary and quasi-literary periodicals in English
that there is a very considerable amount of high critical ability
available. Buried and obscured to an ineffectual degree among much that
is formal, foolish, and venial, there is to be found to-day a really
quite remarkable number of isolated reviews, criticisms and articles in
which style is apparent, in which discrimination shines fitfully, in
which there is the unmistakable note of honest enthusiasm for good
work. For the most part, such criticism bears also the marks of haste--
as, indeed, it must do when a review as long as the column of a daily
paper, a day's work, that is, of steady writing, earns scarcely a
pound. But the stuff is there. Scarcely a number of the _Academy_,
or the _Spectator_, scarcely a week of the _Morning Post_,
the _Daily News_, or the _Daily Chronicle_, but there is a
review, or a piece of a review, that has the stigmata of literature.
And this suggestion is that some of these writers shall be got
together, shall be paid at least as well as popular short-story writers
are paid, shall each have a definite department marked out under a
trustworthy editor, and be pledged to limit their work to the pages of
this new critical magazine. Their work would be signed, and there they
would be, conspicuously urged to do the best that was in them,
_apropos_ of more or less contemporary books and writers. They
would have leisure for deliberate judgments, for the development of
that consistency of thought which the condition of journalism renders