Messrs. Malling, of Duke Street, Soho, sell a particular kind of cartridge paper and some special pins, gum, and a knife, called “The Reviewer’s Outfit.” I do not know that these are necessary, but they cost only a few pence, and are certainly of advantage in the final process: To wit:—Seizing firmly the book to be reviewed, write down the title, price, publisher, and (in books other than anonymous) the author’s name, at the top of the sheet of paper you have chosen. The book should then be taken in both hands and opened sharply, with a gesture not easily described, but acquired with very little practice. The test of success is that the book should give a loud crack and lie open of itself upon the table before one. This initial process is technically called “breaking the back” of a book, but we need not trouble ourselves yet with technical terms. One of the pages so disclosed should next be torn out and the word “extract” written in the corner, though not before such sentences have been deleted as will leave the remainder a coherent paragraph. In the case of historical and scientific work, the preface must be torn out bodily, the name of the Reviewer substituted for the word “I,” and the whole used as a description of the work in question. What remains is very simple. The forms, extracts, &c., are trimmed, pinned, and gummed in order upon the cartridge paper (in some offices brown paper), and the whole is sent to press.
I need hardly say that only the most elementary form of review can be constructed upon this model, but the simplest notice contains all the factors which enter into the most complicated and most serious of literary criticism and pronouncements.
In this, as in every other practical trade, an ounce of example is worth a ton of precept, and I have much pleasure in laying before the student one of the best examples that has ever appeared in the weekly press of how a careful, subtle, just, and yet tender review, may be written. The complexity of the situation which called it forth, and the lightness of touch required for its successful completion, may be gauged by the fact that Mr. Mayhem was the nephew of my employer, had quarrelled with him at the moment when the notice was written, but will almost certainly be on good terms with him again; he was also, as I privately knew, engaged to the daughter of a publisher who had shares in the works where the review was printed.
A YOUNG POET IN DANGER.
Mr. Mayhem’s “Pereant qui Nostra.”
We fear that in “Pereant qui Nostra,” Mr. Mayhem has hardly added to his reputation, and we might even doubt whether he was well advised to publish it at all. “Tufts in an Orchard” gave such promise, that the author of the exquisite lyrics it contained might easily have rested on the immediate fame that first effort procured him:
“Lord, look to England; England looks to you,”
and—
“Great unaffected vampires and the moon,”
are lines the Anglo-Saxon race will not readily let die.