ed body, governing with energy and an habitually bold policy, a
taste for stir and excitement which must infallibly affect all literary
performances.]

Let us now turn the picture and consider the other side of it; let us
transport ourselves into the midst of a democracy, not unprepared by
ancient traditions and present culture to partake in the pleasures of
the mind. Ranks are there intermingled and confounded; knowledge and
power are both infinitely subdivided, and, if I may use the expression,
scattered on every side. Here then is a motley multitude, whose
intellectual wants are to be supplied. These new votaries of the
pleasures of the mind have not all received the same education; they
do not possess the same degree of culture as their fathers, nor any
resemblance to them--nay, they perpetually differ from themselves,
for they live in a state of incessant change of place, feelings,
and fortunes. The mind of each member of the community is therefore
unattached to that of his fellow-citizens by tradition or by common
habits; and they have never had the power, the inclination, nor the
time to concert together. It is, however, from the bosom of this
heterogeneous and agitated mass that authors spring; and from the same
source their profits and their fame are distributed. I can without
difficulty understand that, under these circumstances, I must expect
to meet in the literature of such a people with but few of those strict
conventional rules which are admitted by readers and by writers in
aristocratic ages. If it should happen that the men of some one period
were agreed upon any such rules, that would prove nothing for the
following period; for amongst democratic nations each new generation is
a new people. Amongst such nations, then, literature will not easily
be subjected to strict rules, and it is impossible that any such rules
should ever be permanent.

In democracies it is by no means the case that all the men who cultivate
literature have received a literary education; and most of those who
have some tinge of belles-lettres are either engaged in politics, or in
a profession which only allows them to taste occasionally and by stealth
the pleasures of the mind. These pleasures, therefore, do not constitute
the principal charm of their lives; but they are considered as a
transient and necessary recreation amidst the serious labors of life.
Such man can never acquire a sufficiently intimate knowledge of the art
of