We have as yet received no great number of detailed criticisms or suggestions for improvement. But there have been some, both in the Press and in the letters from our correspondents. Some of the suggestions that have been made we shall adopt; some we shall not; one or two of the most interesting are based on a misunderstanding. The most noticeable of these derive from the notion that the LONDON MERCURY was intended to be an exact analogue of the _Mercure de France_, and borrowed its title from that excellent paper. We may as well explain, once and for all, that the similitude with the _Mercure de France_, happy though it may be, was reached by accident; our own title was derived directly from the Mercuries which were the earliest products of the English periodical Press; and for our scheme we are indebted to no paper, British or foreign. A Scottish critic observes that "Belgian literature owed its notable capture of Europe largely to its [the _Mercure's_] whole-hearted welcome, and the new movement in Germany associated with the names of Rilke and Zweig found its first foreign recognition in its pages. Moreover, it surveyed the whole field of human intellectual achievement--philosophy, science, religion--in its articles.... The name of M. Davray at the foot of a _Mercure_ article has made more than one British writer's reputation in Paris, and Europe would have been entirely ignorant that there was a new and rich literature in Spanish-America had not the _Mercure_ discovered it and blazoned forth its merits." We might, if we would, make some remark on the detail of this. Rilke is not a major poet; Zweig is an unimportant, over-exuberant critic who tried, in vain, to persuade the late Emile Verhaeren that he was a German; the fame of Spanish-American literature, trumpeted though it may have been by the _Mercure_, has not yet reached London. But we prefer to concentrate on the more important point, and that is that our functions, as we conceive them, are not those of the _Mercure de France_. We have already published letters from French and American correspondents; we shall shortly publish letters from Italian, Russian, and German correspondents; we shall from time to time publish fuller articles about recent developments in foreign countries. But there _are_ certain limits to our space, and there _is_ a centre in our plans. It is an admirable thing to disseminate the works of good Belgian and Spanish-American authors, and we hope that we shall not overlook anything really important that comes from any quarter of the globe. But our principal object is to assist people to read the good English authors of the past, and to stimulate the popularity of good English authors of the present. There are those to whom any foreigner, writing in some mysteriously wonderful language, like French or Polish or Spanish-American, is a portent; but we are not amongst them. We desire to keep the British public in touch with all foreign developments that may be considered likely to be of special interest to the British public; but we certainly do not intend to devote to the study of foreign authors space that might more profitably be given to the examination of a dead or living man who has written in our own tongue. The _Mercure_ bestows a great deal of attention on foreign authors; it publishes political articles; it concerns itself largely with problems of philosophy and religion. Some of these questions will be ignored by the LONDON MERCURY. Some it will discuss; regarding some its functions will be purely that of a recorder. But it does not propose to deflect from its original purpose, which was to publish the best contemporary "creative work" that it could obtain, to criticise new books and old, and to minister to the other needs of the British reader and the British book-collector. It is just as well that this should be clear.