When circumstances have permitted me to lift up my prayer to the gods,
of whom there are several, and whose multiplicity has only been
forgotten during the less felicitous periods, I have requested for
contemporary use, some system of delayed book reviewing, some system
whereby the critic of current things is permitted to state that a few
books read with pleasure five or six years ago can still be with
pleasure perused, and that their claims to status as literature have
not been obliterated by half or all of a decade.