AN INFANT PRODIGY.* Is Mr. Burroughs endeavouring to discover how
badly it is possible for a popular author to write without offending his readers ? There is discernible in most popular writers a certain competence—mechanical sometimes, or crude and impulsive ; but Mr. Burroughs is the most incompetent writer alive. No bored uncle anxious to slip downstairs to the dinner-table again would let such howlers creep into his stories. It is not as if there were only one or two : every page is packed with them.
Had the reader, at the age of six or seven, a habit of lying awake in bed and telling himself stories, tales of the most romantic, fantastic, and egotistic adventure—wild impro- vizations on the theme of some book read to him, sometimes too wild even for such grown-up engendering, as lunatic as dreams in the dissociation of their narrative threads ? Then he knows what to expect from Mr. Burroughs. Mr. Burroughs exhibits the mind of a precocious imaginative six-year-old ; he has the same tendency to ineffective exaggeration, and he has the same ugly streak discernible which makes him like to gloat over cruelty, if its object be pretty enough ; and he has as little memory of what he said in the paragraph before as a monkey has of where he dropped the shell of the last nut. Moreover, he has the child's ultimate dependence for the source of all his fantasticalities upon his reading. In fact, Mr. Burroughs is, in spirit, one of the most notoriously successful of all the infant prodigies who have attacked the twentieth century as a commercial proposition.
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