name, illustrate its truth.  Unless you are a very great person indeed, the surest way to lose a reputation as poet is to gain one as critic.  It is true that for a time one may help the other, and that if you are very fecund, and let your poetical issues keep pace with your critical, you may even avoid the catastrophe altogether; but it is an unmistakable risk, and if in the end you are not catalogued as a great critic, you will assuredly be set down as a minor poet:  whereas if you had stuck to your last, there is no telling what fame might not have been yours.  Limitation, not versatility, is the fashion to-day.  The man with the one talent, not the five, is the hero of the hour.

Besides, this sudden change of his spots on the part of the poet is unfair to the publisher, who is thus apt to find himself surprised out of his just gain.  For, at the present moment, I would back almost any poet of my acquaintance against any publisher in a matter of business.  This is unfair, for the publisher is a being slow to move, slow to take in changed conditions, always two generations, at least, behind his authors.  Consequently, this sudden development of capacity on the part of the poet is liable to take him unprepared, and the mere apparition of a poet who can add up a pounds shillings and pence column offhand might well induce apoplexy.  Yet it is to be feared that that providence which arms every evil thing with its fang has so protected the publisher with an instinctive dread of verse in any form, and especially in manuscript, that he has, after all, little to fear from the poet’s new gifts.

II

But, indeed, my image just now was both uncomplimentary and unjust:  for, parallel with the change in the poet to which I have referred, a still more unnatural change is making itself apparent in the type of the publisher.  It would almost seem as if the two are changing places.  Instead of the poet humbly waiting, hat in hand, kicking his heels for half a day in the publisher’s office, it is the publisher who seeks him, who writes for appointments at his private house, or invites him to dinner.  Yet it behoves the poet to be on his guard.  A publisher, like another personage, has many shapes of beguilement, and it is not unlikely that this flattering deference is but another wile to entrap the unwary.  There is no way of circumventing the dreamer so subtle as to flatter his business qualities.  We all like to be praised for the something we cannot do.  It is for this reason that Mr. Stevenson interferes with Samoan politics, when he should be writing romances—­just the desire of the dreamer to play the man of action.