my mind with the ideas of others? Is it not bad for my style to read any books except the recognised classics?" Personally, I have little patience with such an attitude of mind. The man or woman who has so little originality or inventive power as to be bewildered, stunted, overwhelmed by contact with the thoughts of others, offers a rather hopeless case anyhow; the great majority of normal human beings find something stimulating rather than deadening in wide reading; and to the craftsman who is really interested in his art it must be a very hopeless book indeed that does not give him something upon which to whet his inventive faculty. The very imperfections of a plot in any current penny-dreadful may suggest, by the glaring way in which an opportunity is missed, a new twist that might be given—and so you have the starting point of a new and perhaps a big story. And in any
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