No, gentle readers cannot be distinguished from ungentle, precipitous, or ordinary readers by any lines of age, occupation, or class. On the other hand, I have known old ladies over eighty who were anything but gentle readers, and plenty of maidens in boudoirs who had no patience with any of the tenets of the gentle reader’s faith. In appearance he is a great, burly man, and during the daytime he ekes out his income by making screen doors, but his taste in reading, if not his range, would be practically identical with that of William Dean Howells. One of the few unformed examples of the gentle reader that I know to-day is night telegraph operator at a lonely railroad station in upper New York. Old-time lawyers, almost to a man, were gentle readers, and so were many old-time physicians. In fact, at the age of ten I was one myself. I have known small boys and girls who were gentle readers. I have known a grizzled old colonel of the regular army who, when off duty, was a gentle reader of the gentlest kind. Offhand, they would probably be my own, but the true race of gentle readers - whether at present it is extinct or is merely submerged - was once not at all confined to such types as these. The justice of these images I am willing to admit. Even to-day the half-forgotten phrase would probably call up to most minds the same set of images - of a bookish, timid old parson fussing harmlessly around the shelves of his library, of a sturdy, middle-aged country gentlewoman with sun hat and garden shears, or possibly of a twittering, timorous maiden of the 1840’s seated in a boudoir decorated in the manner of a lace-paper valentine. One thinks of a gentle reader as one might think of a gentle horse or a gentle breeze. It carried the same idea that appears in the words ‘gentility’ and ‘gentry.’ Thus, when an author of the eighteenth century addressed his ‘gentle readers,’ it was with the slightly sardonic flourish with which he might have said, ‘My lords and masters.’ But for a hundred years or more I am sure that the term ‘gentle reader’ has had very nearly the meaning in which I am using it here. Originally, I suppose, this adjective ‘gentle’ was used in a sense quite different from that which it later acquired. Now I gaze around me in increasing bewilderment as I ask, Is it possible that I am the only living American who still likes quiet stories? In my own person do I represent the entire surviving public for amiable, leisurely novels about amiable, leisurely people, doing amiable, leisurely things? Am I, in short, the last incarnation of that once courted and ubiquitous individual, ‘the gentle reader’? II For many years I fondly believed that my taste in reading matter, while not necessarily universal, was at least shared by a considerable body of agreeable men and women. This is very much the state of mind in which I find myself to-day as I turn the pages of our magazines, saunter through the bookshops, or glance at the lists of new publications. Finally some feeble old man is haled from the rear of the shop to admit that he knows what you have in mind, but to add, without interest, ‘We no longer have any call for that style.’ A canvass of other shops produces the same result, until slowly you are faced by two sombre conclusions: either you have always been more or less of a crank where hats were concerned, or else the swift passage of time has left you behind - an outmoded buck, a pathetic survival. But when you go to a hatter’s to renew your stock the clerks all stare at you in dull incomprehension. If the question were raised, you would take your oath that, within a week, you had seen a dozen well-dressed men wearing precisely that sort of headgear. For example, you have grown accustomed to a certain kind of hat which you consider both rakish and practical. IT is one of the most upsetting moments of life when one discovers that some taste, habit, or standard of judgment which one has trusted for years and supposed to be universal is not really universal at all, but is merely a personal eccentricity.
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