and the Johns Hopkins, but did not graduate at either preferring newspaper work to college routine. Beginning at nineteen, he went to work as a reporter on the Philadelphia Press, and did some notable writing. Among other things, he went to live for five or six weeks among the thieves of the Quaker City, and landed six burglars in Moyamensing, besides writing some startling copy. Drifting from paper to paper, as reporters will, he made his mark in all the Philadelphia offices. Together with "Mort " McMichael, he started a small sheet called the Stage, which soon died.

In 1888 the Press sent him to London with the American cricket team, and while there he wrote, in addition to his sporting letters, some descriptions of Whitechapel that were syndicated to all the prominent American newspapers. On his return he obtained a letter from Mr. Childs to Joseph Pulitzer, and came to New York to go to work on the World, but on his way to a hotel he met Mr. Brisbane, who proposed that he should go instead to the Evening Sun. Davis was nothing loath, and walked on up the street with a hatbox and a bundle of walking sticks in his hands. On his way to the hotel he was met by Sheeney Mike, the famous bunco operator, who, judging by Davis' very British garments that he was a stranger, proceeded to take him in.

Davis went with him joyously, making an excuse, however, to run away for a few minutes. These minutes he utilized by going to the Evening Sun office and asking if they wanted a bunco story. They did. He returned, was "played for a sucker," and picking out the chief of the gang told him that he had plenty of money at the Astor House, and would go and get it. They started, and when they were on Broadway Davis collared his man and called for a policeman. In half an hour he had his prisoner in the tombs, and an hour later his first story was written for the Evening Sun.

Since then he has done great quantities of most excellent work for that paper and much outside work. A special faculty he has is for rapid writing. Some of his "Van Bibber" and "Travers " stories have been turned off inside of an hour, and have been specially praised for their high finish. He has also written much verse and a few notable magazine stories. Among these, the two which have attracted most attention are "My Disreputable Friend, Mr. Reagan " and "The Cynical Miss Catherwaight." He has also made a name in the leading sporting papers as the best descriptive writer on football of the present generation.

One of his earliest stories, called "Gallagher,"

attracted the attention of Mr. James R. Osgood, the veteran Bostonian, now the London representative of Harper & Brothers, and he, making inquiries as to the author, declared that if Davis should write a book, he would be giad to publish it in London, for he was sure it would make a hit. Similar recognition by others led to the offering of the place of managing editor of Harper's Weekly to him when the veteran Mr. Foord was compelled by ill health to resign it. Mr. Davis will assume charge on the first of February, and in the mean time is travelling, partly on business and partly for pleasure.

Among the characteristics which make him, even at his present age, a conspicuous man is his athletic training. He is remarkably strong without looking so, and is an adept at most outdoor sports. He is unmarried. David A. Curtis, in the Fall River Globe.

LITERARY HYSTERIA.

Beginners in literature nurse one delusion with singular persistence. Next to the confidence that they have in their own genius, the strongest basis of all their hopes of success is the imaginary "friend at court," whose interposition in their behalf is one day to launch them into the full tide of fame and fortune.

The most pathetic part of every well-established writer's experience is connected with the letters he receives from ambitious young people, who fancy that all they need is a note of recommendation. The covert meaning of these letters is that the beginner has extraordinary talent, against which all the editors have studiously set their faces. Of course, such a theory is known to be preposterous by every competent writer who casts a glance back over the road by which he has come to success in his profession. No amount of friendly recommendation can advance the interests of an aspirant for literary rewards. The editor cares not a fig for any man's "influence"; the publisher depends upon his well-paid literary advisers. This is so, and it is right that it is so.

The vision of a "friend at court" is at best a dishonest vision. The writer who indulges it loses self-respect with every glance, every thought, every calculation connected with it. A friend at court is a lobbyist who is to work the writer's manuscripts into the favor of editor or publisher by means of a powerful influence not inherent in the manuscript itself.

In the first place, the man or woman who would

accept any success in literary life, save that compelled by the intrinsic value of art and thought, could never feel a clear right to what is highest and best in that life. Doubtless young persons whose imaginations have become inflamed by literary ambition do not fully realize the shame of contemplating any means of forcing accomplishment save simple desert.

Let us examine the terms of some epistolary forms familiar to the eyes of prosperous authors. I will not divulge how I came in possession of these interesting documents, but the statement must be made that I have taken as many as eleven out of one morning's mail. Here is one form :

Mr. Nicholas Stubbs:

MY DEAR SIR,- Although an utter stranger to you, I feel like one of your oldest acquaintances. For years I have read and admired with enthusiasm everything that you have written. Feeling sure that one who writes so tenderly and touchingly must be a friend to all struggling writers, I take courage to send you the inclosed poem [or story, as the case may be], which I hope you will be kind enough to read. I feel certain that you will appreciate my situation when I say that, being entirely unknown to the magazine editors, I cannot get them to print a thing that I write. If you would only write me a word or two recommending my article to of the magazine, I know he would accept it, and I would be forever your debtor,

etc.

Now, a letter like that is pathetic in one sense, and brings with it to the recipient something very touching and appealing; but the other side of it is distressingly offensive. Every artist, remembering his own terrible struggles with the fiends of earth and air, responds with ready sympathy to any cry from a victim of his own kind of cacoëthes. This much for a common experience. The offence of the thing lies in the insult to art. Nothing but compelling, inherent merit ought to urge any art-product into standing. Every extrinsic aid is a poison to honesty and a mortal affront to genius. How much such a letter means to the writer of it is perfectly understood by every artist who has forged a way to some sort of permanent position. It is like reading a heart by torch-light to glance over the nervous chirography. One recognizes the strain of the struggle between the words. The devil of ambition is on top of sincerity, and is tearing it to shreds. All that the poor letter-writing aspirant has would he give only to see himself in the great magazine, no matter by what lobbying and trickery he arrived there. This is the shame of it.

Another epistolary form will be remembered by those who have been forced to receive the like:

MY DEAR MR. CHUBBS: Pardon a faithful admirer of your superb literary work for infringing upon your valuable time. I come to you in my darkest hour for light and help.

Do not deny me. I have just finished a novel, the MS. of which I send by this express for your perusal. What I beg you to do is to give me in writing your critical endorsement of this work. I have tried three publishers, but they all say that, owing to the number of MSS. on hand, they cannot consider my proposition. Now, your endorsement would enable me to sell my work, and thus open a career for me, etc.

This letter lacks the element of pathos, and verges close to the line of open rascality in its spirit. No self-respecting person could write it while in his normal state. It is interesting to observe, however, that this sort of thing does not come directly out of dishonesty. The source is in a point of view which seems to be natural to the isolated individual who has the itch for writing. Self-criticism comes late to these ambitious hermits, and before it comes there is sure to be a period of productiveness without valuable results. Crude things appear perfect in the absence of any true standard, and the blame of failure is laid upon outside causes. The poor victim of writer's itch, unable to see why his poetry is not as good as Tennyson's, or his stories as acceptable as Guy de Maupassant's, falls into a maudlin mood, and sends a cringing letter to some author who, by honest work and unsparing self-pruning, has achieved a measure of success. This hysterical performance is proof positive of incompetency; it discloses the want of that instinctive sense of propriety which is a prime factor of art.

But the worst form of all assumed by those missiles of torture, known as literary mendicant letters, is the following:

DEAR MR. NIBBS: Knowing as I do that your name signed to the enclosed MS. will insure its sale for a handsome price, I send it to you with this proposition: If you will copy it in your own hand, and use it as your own production, you may retain one-third of the price for which you sell it, etc.

It will be understood at once that dignified comment would be inadequate to the need of one who has just received an epistle like this. Even the enclosed postage stamps fail to meet the requirements of the occasion. -Maurice Thompson, in America.

IS POETRY A DEFUNCT ART?

Sculptors, singers, painters there must always be; but need there be poets any longer, since the world has discovered how to say all it wants to say in prose? Will any one who has anything of importance to communicate be likely, for the future, to communicate it through the medium of metrical language? A large number of thoughtful persons at the present time are, undoubtedly, disposed to answer in the negative, although a certain decency

forbids them openly to say so. Plenty of clever people secretly regard the Muse as a distinguished old lady, of good family, who has been a beauty and a wit in her day, but who really rules by sufferance only in these years of her decline. They whisper that she is sinking into second childhood, repeats herself when she converses, and has exchanged her early liberal tastes for a love of what is puerile, ingenious, and finikin.

The intellectual condition of our times differs from that of all preceding ages in no other point so much as in its attitude toward the writings of the dead. To the class whom Pope addressed, Shakespeare and Milton were phantoms, Chaucer and Spenser not so much as names. The only doubt was whether Alexander Pope was man enough to arrest attention by the intrinsic merits of his poetry. If his verse was admitted to be good, his public were not distracted by a preference for other verse which they had known for a longer time. This remained true until about a generation ago.

as

The activity of the dead is now paramount, and threatens to paralyze original writing altogether. In this great throng of resuscitated souls, all of whom have forfeited their copyright, how is the modern poet to exist? He has no longer to compete· "his great forefathers did, from Homer down to Ben" with the leading spirits of his own generation, but with the genius of the world. At every turn, the thronging company of the ghosts impedes and disheartens the modern writer; and it is no wonder if the new Orpheus throws down his lyre in despair when the road to his desire is held by such an invincible army of spectres.

On the whole, however, it is highly unlikely that the antiquarian passion of our age will last. There are already signs of its wearing out. As to the old poets, one by one they pass into text-books and are lost. Chaucer is done for, and so is Milton; Goldsmith is annotated, Scott prepared for "local examinations"; even Byron, the loose, the ungrammatical, is edited as a school-book. We shall see Wordsworth captured, Shelley boiled down for the use of babes, and Keats elaborately annotated, with his blunders in classical mythology exposed. The schoolmaster is the only friend the poet of the future dares to look to, for he alone has the power utterly to destroy the loveliness and mystery which are the charm of the old poets. But even a secondrate verse-writer may hope to live by the side of an Elizabethan poet edited for the Clarendon Press.

It is usually said, in hasty generalization, that the poetry of the present age is unique in the extreme refinement of its exterior mechanism. Those who

say this are not aware that the great poets whose virile simplicity and robust carelessness of detail they applaud have almost without exception been scrupulously attentive to form. No modern writer has been so learned in rhythm as Milton, so faultless in rhyme-arrangement as Spenser. But what is true is that a care for form and a considerable skill in the technical art of verse have been acquired by writers of a lower order, and that this sort of perfection is no longer the hall-mark of a great master. We may expect it, therefore, to attract less attention in the future, and although, assuredly, the bastard jargon of Walt Whitman, and kindred returns to sheer barbarism, will not be accepted, technical perfection will more and more be taken as a matter of course, as a portion of the poet's training which shall be as indispensable and as little worthy of notice as that a musician should read his notes correctly.-Edmund Gosse, in the January Forum.

"RETURNED, WITH THANKS."

One of the most pathetic things in the relation subsisting between editor and contributor is found in the brief, but expressive, legend—"Returned, with thanks." To the literary aspirant who is just beginning what he hopes will prove a remunerative, if not a famous, career it comes as a stunning shower-bath, dashing his pretty dream to the ground, and sometimes deterring him from further pursuit of it. He supposes the experience is peculiar to himself. If he possesses much conceit, he is likely to be affronted; but if he is both sensitive and modest, the blow either dazes or crushes him, at least temporarily.

That he who writes will be sensitive is not only certain; it is also a voucher, for one part at least, of the successful author's endowment. For the literary choir is not less irritable and discordant over things that yield dissatisfaction than is the musical one, concerning which this condition has been condensed into a proverb. As to modesty, few writers possess it in excess; or, if they do at the outset of their career, time and experience soon relieve them of so troublesome a trait.

But editors do not wish to be cruel or hardhearted, however much they may seem so to the unspurred and unfledged writer. The very best and most famous of them have often told me that one of the saddest and most thankless duties they have to perform is to return a contribution that for some good reason does not prove to be available.

When I once wrote some verses treating this necessity humorously, I had to apply to three editors in succession before I could get them printed, the first two assuring me sorrowfully that the matter was quite too serious to be treated with levity. And Mr. Curtis, in his delightful Easy Chair," has given us over and over again his confirmation of this editorial sympathy. How often, and with what inimitable grace and tenderness has he written to some typical contributor of the limitations set upon a great periodical or magazine! What soothing emollients he has poured out on the disturbed writer's bruised heart!

It is not you, Ralph, or you, Rebecca, he has said in effect, that are necessarily at fault. Doubtless your piece is of the very best description, and we publish often, as you so feelingly allege, those no better, or not so good. But then, there are reasons and reasons, which you would soon see if you were the editor. The very first is the limitation of our space; another is the frequency with which we have already treated your topic or a line of topics into which it falls; another is its length; and so on to the end of a long list, not one of which rebuts the assumption that the unfortunate article is a capital one, and every way worthy of being embalmed in the choicest type.

It is a mistake, then, for the literary aspirant to imagine that his returned manuscript has committed any offence, or that his muse, if he has strided Pegasus, cannot soar. What he must do is to sail forth with it again and again, until it reaches a favored port, which it will surely do, if it has the requisite merit, somewhere and at some date. President Lincoln used to say, when he was trying faithfully and with great diligence to place the various able men who were presented to him for the civil service and for the army, that it was a very difficult matter to get the square pegs in the round holes, and the round pegs in the square ones. And it is just this difficulty which confronts the writer for periodicals and magazines. No matter how experienced he may be, he will often fail before he brings his commodity to the market which waits for it.

Does the literary aspirant suppose that the great names in authorship, whose fame is now secure, and whose emolument he would fain covet for his own wares, were not also baffled as he is by "Returned, with thanks"? If he does, he supposes wrongly. These are words that were as familiar to Thackeray and Carlyle as they are to you. Nothing in Thackeray's early period took the English press with more storm and triumph than

his brilliant and sparkling "Yellowplush Papers." Yet, when he offered them, or matter of their kind, to the staid Edinburgh Review, the editor of that publication employed his blue pencil and scissors relentlessly. The Yellowplush Papers" he did not print at all, and they were only sent successfully to Frazer's Magazine, where they began their

career.

Carlyle had treatment of the same sort. Upon his articles, when used, even Jeffrey employed an editorial surgery of cutting out and writing in that would have irritated a much less sensitive writer than he was, "till Carlyle must have been more than mortal if he did not use stronger language than he put upon paper." When it was all done, Jeffrey concluded that "Carlyle would not do" for the Edinburgh Review. But as Jeffrey's "would not do" did not snuff out the muse of Wordsworth, to which it was likewise applied, so it did not seriously impede Carlyle's success.

Any number of writers besides these, both English and American, have seen their best work ornamented by "Returned, with thanks." The decision it implies, therefore, is not necessarily a critical one at all. It may be critical, but the chances are that it is not. Only the other day, in speaking of poetry, the editor of one of our most famous magazines said to me: "You would be surprised to see the kind of poems I reject, and the number of them." "Of course," said I, "every editor gets a mountain of chaff for one kernel of wheat.” "No," said he, "I do not mean that; I refer to the multitude of excellent and appealing ones that I cannot possibly make room for."

A friend of mine, who writes well for various periodicals, keeps all the editorial refusals that have come to him in a special scrap-book. This may promote humility, or, if not that, good humor. It shows, at any rate, that the refusal is no cause for chagrin or discouragement. An English writer said, many years ago: "I have had manuscripts returned again and again, but they have always found a publisher in the end, and I have an impression, which is, I believe, shared by many public writers, that the best articles are those that are returned the oftenest. I know that they are sometimes the most successful, and, to compare small things with great, that, it is notorious, has been the case with two or three historical works and works of fiction, which, before they were published, were metaphorically scored all over by the publishers' readers with these words, "Returned, with thanks." -Joel Benton, in the Ladies' Home Journal for February.

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libraries whether complete sets of the two magazines are on file. Both magazines are educational in their character, and, being the only magazines in the world devoted solely to explaining the practical details of literary work, they should be found in every public library in the United States. The number of complete sets available is rapidly diminishing, and librarians will find it impossible to get complete files unless they order soon. Unbound sets can no longer be supplied.

"THE WRITER" FOR JANUARY.

Preparing

THE WRITER for January contains: Copy," by M. L. Allen; "A Professional Critic," by Matthew Marvin ; "George Edward Woodberry"; "The Variations of 'Said,' " by Arthur C. Grissom; "Don't Be a Coward," by W. S. Harwood; "A Word about Quotations," by J. Henry Hager; "The Braddon-Maxwell Book-making Manufactory," by Henry Llewellyn Williams; editorials on "The Use of Typewriters by Authors," Newspaper English," "Stories with Two Endings," "Rudyard Kipling's Latest Freak"; "Slipshod Writing," by M. Sheeleigh; and the usual departments entitled: Queries," "The Use and Misuse of Words," "Book Reviews," Helpful Hints and Suggestions," "Literary Articles in Periodicals," and "News and Notes."

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HOW OLIVER OPTIC WRITES A STORY.

Regarding this title as a sort of conundrum addressed to me, I am inclined to guess it by replying that if I have a story to write, I write it. I have no inflexible rules; I use no machinery but a typewriter; and have no patent apparatus of any kind for laying the foundation of the story. I may add that I do not begin to write, and continue to write till I have a required amount of matter, and then chop it off, as some have thought. On the contrary, there is method in the operation; there must be a plan, which must be worked out; and when it is worked out, the story is done, and it is time to stop. If one thinks he is to stop only when he has produced on paper so many thousand words, it will require an extra effort of the imagination to enable him to believe that he has written a story.

I am entirely willing to give the modus operandi of "How I Write My Stories," so far as there is any " modus" about it. I fancy that mine is substan