service he bought a library en bloc, and, not knowing any more
about books than a peccary knows of the harmonies of the heavenly
choir, he gave orders for the arrangement of the volumes in this wise:
"Range me," he quoth, "the grenadiers (folios) at the bottom, the
battalion (octavos) in the middle, and the light-bobs (duodecimos) at
the top!"

Samuel Johnson, dancing attendance upon Lord Chesterfield, could hardly
have felt his humiliation more keenly than did the historian Gibbon
when his grace the Duke of Cumberland met him bringing the third volume
of his "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" to the ducal mansion.
This history was originally printed in quarto; Gibbon was carrying the
volume and anticipating the joy of the duke upon its arrival. What did
the duke say? "What?" he cried. "Ah, another ---- big square book,
eh?"

It is the fashion nowadays to harp upon the degeneracy of humanity; to
insist that taste is corrupted, and that the faculty of appreciation is
dead. We seem incapable of realizing that this is the golden age of
authors, if not the golden age of authorship.

In the good old days authors were in fact a despised and neglected
class. The Greeks put them to death, as the humor seized them. For a
hundred years after his death Shakespeare was practically unknown to
his countrymen, except Suckling and his coterie: during his life he was
roundly assailed by his contemporaries, one of the latter going to the
extreme of denouncing him as a daw that strutted in borrowed plumage.
Milton was accused of plagiarism, and one of his critics devoted many
years to compiling from every quarter passages in ancient works which
bore a similarity to the blind poet's verses. Even Samuel Johnson's
satire of "London" was pronounced a plagiarism.

The good old days were the days, seemingly, when the critics had their
way and ran things with a high hand; they made or unmade books and
authors. They killed Chatterton, just as, some years later, they
hastened the death of Keats. For a time they were all-powerful. It
was not until the end of the eighteenth century that these professional
tyrants began to lose their grip, and when Byron took up the lance
against them their doom was practically sealed.

Who would care a picayune in these degenerate days what Dr. Warburton
said pro or con a book? It was Warburton (then Bishop of Gloucester)
who remarked of Granger's "Biographical History of England" that it was