A Reviewer and his Bookish Prejudices

Prejudices, of course, are just what a reviewer ought not to have, least of all the kind of reviewer I am. For I am a hack. The term is commonly used in a derogatory sense, though I see nothing in it to be ashamed of. Its definition allows the compiler of Chambers's Dictionary to have one of his little jokes—“n. Hackwork, literary drudgery for which a person is hired by a publisher, as making dictionaries, etc.”