Printers' Pie. (Sphere and Tatter Offices. Is. net.)—This is the
fifth "Serving up of the Pie." Various literary men and artists have provided the materials. Messrs. W. Hugh Spottiswoode and Arthur Croxton have put them into form ; other help has been liberally given, and the public is invited to partake at the nominal price of one shilling net. In 1903 there were ten thousand "paying guests," last year fifty thousand. The rate of increase is better, it will be observed, than arithmetical progression. May it continue to improve ! Perhaps the best thing that we can do is to give an admirable bit by Mr. Austin Dobson. "A Pleasant Invective against Printing," he calls it, Well ; we do not object when "the righteous smite us friendly and reprove us":- " The Press Is too much with us small and great;
We are undone of chatter and on dit, Report, retort, rejoinder, repartee, Mole-hill and mare'a-neet, fiction up-to-date, Babble of booklets, bicker of debate, Aspect of A., and attitude of B.— A waste of words that drive us like a sea, Mere derelict of Ourselves, and helpless freight I
' 0 for a lodge in some vast wilderness ' Some region unapproachable of Print, Where never cablegram could gain access, And telephones were not, nor any hint Of tidings new or old, but Man might pipe Ills soul to Nature,—careless of the Type I "
We may mention Mr. Will Owen's sketches, and, though it is always dangerous to compare, say that we think of Phil May.
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