Americans and Others
Less commercial, but quite as importunate, are the correspondents who belong to literary societies, and who have undertaken to read, before these select circles, papers upon every conceivable subject, from the Bride of the Canticle to the divorce laws of France. They regret their own ignorance—as well they may—and blandly ask for aid. There is no limit to demands of this character. The young Englishwoman who wrote to Tennyson, requesting some verses which she might read as her own at a picnic, was not more intrepid than the American school-girl who recently asked a man of letters to permit her to see an unpublished address, as she had heard that it dealt with the subject of her graduation paper, and hoped it might give her some points. It is hard to believe that the timidity natural to youth—or which we used to think natural to youth—could be so easily overcome; or that the routine of school work, which makes
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