he Temple of Literary
Fame is almost always through double gates--couplets. And yet I have
known youthful poets, apparently bound for Paternoster Row, bolt off the
course in a year or two, to the delight of their friends, and become, of
their own free will, drysalters.

There is so much talk about the 'indications of immortality in early
childhood' (of a very different kind from those referred to by
Wordsworth), and it is so much the habit of biographers to use
magnifiers when their subject is small, that it needs some courage to
avow my belief that the tastes of boys have very little significance. A
clever boy can be trained to almost anything, and an ordinary boy will
not do one thing much better than another. With the Geniuses I will
allow (for the sake of peace and quietness) that Nature is all-powerful,
but with nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand of us, Second
Nature, Use, is the true mistress; and what will doubtless strike some
people as almost paradoxical, but is nevertheless a fact, Literature is
the calling in which she has the greatest sway.

It is the fashion with that enormous class of people who don't know what
they are talking about, and who take up cuckoo-cries, to speak
contemptuously of modern literature, by which they mean (for they are
acquainted with little else) periodical literature. However small may be
its merits, it is at all events ten times as good as ancient periodical
literature used to be. A very much better authority than myself on such
a subject has lately informed us that the majority of the old essays in
the _Edinburgh Review_, at the very time when it was supposed to be most
'trenchant,' 'masterly,' 'exhaustive,' and a number of other splendid
epithets, are so dull and weak and ignorant, that it is impossible that
they or their congeners would now find acceptance in any periodical of
repute. And with regard to all other classes of old magazine literature,
this verdict is certainly most just.

Let us take what most people suppose to be 'the extreme case,' Magazine
Poetry. Of course there is to-day a great deal of rant and twaddle
published under the name of verse in magazines; yet I could point to
scores and scores of poems that have thus appeared during the last ten
years,[5] which half a century ago would have made--and deservedly have
made--a high reputation for their authors. Such phrases as 'universal
necessity for practical exertion,' 'prosaic character of the age,'