done by competent critics, who sign their articles, or is not done at all. Unsigned reviews in Paris are regarded merely as publishers' advertisements; and as well-known and responsible critics are few, it wisely follows that few books are ever seriously noticed. This is as it should be. If the London Press would adopt this manner, and suppress the daily trivial reviews of trivial books, less time would be wasted on mediocrities, and more time devoted to the few makers of literature. It is, thanks to this indifference to the large majority of incompetent and unoriginal scribblers in France, that here there are far less spurious reputations than across the Channel, where popularity and frantic eulogies in the columns of the newspapers seem to be based on the possession of no conceivable literary quality.
"We publish more than our own share of worthless trash," once said a French writer to me, "but it is always better written than your trash, for our bad writers must have some knowledge of grammar, which it appears yours lack, and they must write with what looks like a certain measure of style, whereas your bad writers shine by absence of the smallest pretension to style of any kind"; which means, of course, that illiterate French men and women know their language better than illiterate English men and women know theirs. They have been better
