The disappearance of the London Mercury, following hard upon that
of the Criterion, leaves this country without a single literary journal better known than the paper in which the Mercury has been merged. The Mercury in its twenty years of life, first under Sir John Squire and latterly under Mr. R. A. Scott-James, had made itself into something of an institution, combining the creative and the critical, the estab- lished and the experimental in a way which no other paper has quite succeeded in achieving. It is not flattering to the public taste of this country that a journal like the London Mercury should be forced to vanish, while in Nazi Germany even now several papers of its kind survive and Republican Spain, in the agonies of Civil War, could support no less than four. The Mercury's circulation, I believe, remained surprisingly good to the end, but it was expensive to produce (because admirably produced) and advertisements were in- sufficient to cover cost.
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