The Age of Tidbits

1895

This is the age of tidbits. People are content to be fed by literary cat's meat men on "scraps" and to nourish the soul on journalistic essences. Such a state of things is the Nemesis of the printing press. It is so much simpler to glance at the newspaper review of books than to read the books for ourselves. As a rule, too, we merely read the startling or spicy extracts which the reviewer is compelled to tear from the context.

The result is that the ordinary person who passes some glib judgment on such a work as the "Thomas Carlyle" of Mr. Froude knows as much of its actual contents as the fashionable idiot in Dickens knew about Shakespeare's sublime tragedy of "Macbeth." To that gentleman "Macbeth" was the play in which there was "a dem'd uncomfortable woman who insists on getting up in the middle of the might and walking about the room with a lighted candle." — National Review.