This Company has been formed to acquire, combine into one, and carry on
the various old-established businesses of literary reviewing hitherto
carried on separately by Messrs. ANDREW LANG (who will join the Board
after allotment), GRANT ALLEN, W. E. GLADSTONE, H. D. TRAILL, T. P.
O'CONNOR, WALTER BESANT, ELKIN MATHEWS, JOHN LANE, Q., A.T.Q.C., QUILLER
COUCH, RICHARD LE GALLIENNE, and others. All these gentlemen have
consented to act as Directors. The advantages of the scheme are obvious.
Hitherto critical opinion, as printed in the daily, weekly, and monthly
press, has been so diversified as to make it impossible for the public
to form a settled judgment on books. For instance, a work may be
described in one place as "possessing in the highest degree the master
qualities of brilliant humour and profound pathos"; while, in another
notice, published on the same day, it may be condemned as "an essay in
stupid buffoonery, which mistakes inversion for paradox, and makes a
parade of sentiment as laughable as its efforts at humour are
melancholy." It is the intention of the Directors to change all this.
Frequent Board-Meetings will be held, at which all books sent for review
will be carefully considered, with a view to deciding how they shall be
treated. The decisions thus come to will be carried out in a series of
articles extending with absolute uniformity over the whole field of
contemporary literature.
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