My experience, however, has not been encouraging.
-- X.

Y., aet.

18, a cheaply-got-up youth, with narrow jaws, and broad, bony, cold, red hands, having been laughed at by the girls in his village, and "got the mitten" (pronounced mittIn) two or three times, falls to souling and controlling, and youthing and truthing, in the newspapers.

Sends me some strings of verses, candidates for the Orthopedic Infirmary, all of them, in which I learn for the millionth time one of the following facts: either that something about a chime is sublime, or that something about time is sublime, or that something about a chime is concerned with time, or that something about a rhyme is sublime or concerned with time or with a chime.

Wishes my opinion of the same, with advice as to his future course.
What shall I do about it?
Tell him the whole truth, and send him a ticket of admission to the Institution for Idiots and Feeble-minded Youth?
One doesn't like to be cruel,--and yet one hates to lie.
Therefore one softens down the ugly central fact of donkeyism, -- recommends study of good models,--that writing verse should be an incidental occupation only, not interfering with the hoe, the needle, the lapstone, or the ledger,--and, above all that there should be no hurry in printing what is written.