Heron remembered his friend of Paris. "An odd name," he thought. "I have heard it before somewhere. I like him. He seems a manly sort of fellow."
Then he found himself wondering what Mr. Money's daughters were like, and wishing he had observed them more closely in Paris, and asking whether it was possible that girls could be pretty and interesting with such an odd name.
DRIFT-WOOD.
THE SPINNING OF LITERATURE.
"Of making many books there is no end," sighed a preacher in times when industrious readers might presumably have kept the run of current literature. Our advantage over Solomon is the utter hopelessness of reading the new works, not to speak of standard acres in the libraries. In this holiday season, chief hatching-time of books, it is pleasant to see them flocking out in numbers so vast. "Germany published 11,315 works of all classes in 1873, 12,070 in 1874, 12,516 in 1875." We rub our hands over statistics like these, because they check any mad ambition to master German contemporary literature; and besides, there are "1,622 newspapers and periodical publications in the German empire." As for the new works in our own tongue, the only way of getting through them would obviously be to do as legislators do with the laws they pass—"read them by title."
Earlier ages, that had not reached this happy hopelessness, produced great bookworms. When the old monks had devoured their convent libraries, they were fain to pay vast sums occasionally for extra reading, as St. Jerome did for the works of Origen; whereas now a reviewer can only glance at his "complimentary copies" of new books, so numerous are they. Bacon argued against abridgements, as if the body of literature could be compassed in his day. A century or two ago there were prodigious Porsons and Johnsons; but such gluttons are now rare. It is true that Mill, between his fourth and eighth years, read in the original all Herodotus and a good part of Xenophon, Lucian, Isocrates, Diogenes Laertius, Plato, and the Annual Register, besides Hume, Gibbon, Robertson, Miller, Mosheim, and other historians; while before the age of thirteen he had mastered the whole of Homer, Virgil, Horace, Sallust, Thucydides, Aristotle's Rhetoric and Logic, Tacitus, Juvenal, Quinctilian, parts of Ovid, Terence, Nepos, Cæsar, Livy, Lucretius, Cicero, Polybius, and many other authors, besides learning geometry, algebra, and the differential calculus. But that lad was crammed scientifically like a Strasbourg goose; our ordinary modern writers are not walking cyclopædias, and are rarely prodigious readers. It is no longer a reproach even for a man not to know all the literature of his specialty; while, as for general reading, when the "Publisher's Circular" tells us that the different books that mankind have made are numbered by millions, we sit down in a most comfortable despair, and pick to our liking.
Thanks to modern fecundity, critics rarely molest authors with demands for the raison d'être of a new book. The reviewer's question used to be, "Why did the man publish? What need was there? What is he trying to show?" One pontiff is said to have suggested burning up all the different books in the world, except six thousand, so that the rest might be read. There used to be pleas for condensations, as if people were still fondly hoping to compass the realm of literature and science, the blessed era of hopelessness having not yet dawned. But it is idle to plead against diffuseness now, when writers are paid by the page or line. "I want," said the editor of "La Situation" to Dumas, "a story from you, entitled 'Terreur Prussienne à Francfort'—60 feuilletons of 400 lines each; total, 84,000 lines." "And if it makes only 58?" responded Dumas. "I require 60, of 400 lines each, averaging 31 letters each line—744,000 letters." At noon of the day agreed upon, the manuscript was in the hands of M. Hollander. If Sir Critic ever came with foot-rule and condensing-pump to gravely detect diffusiveness in the "Terreur Prussienne," it must have diverted the high contracting parties.
It is said that a dialogue of Dumas the elder created a revolution in the French mode of paying romance literature. Dumas, who was reckoned by the line, one day introduced, they say, into his feuilleton this thrilling passage: