literature to appreciate its more delicate beauties; and the minor
shades of expression must escape them. As the time they can devote to
letters is very short, they seek to make the best use of the whole of
it. They prefer books which may be easily procured, quickly read, and
which require no learned researches to be understood. They ask for
beauties, self-proffered and easily enjoyed; above all, they must have
what is unexpected and new. Accustomed to the struggle, the crosses, and
the monotony of practical life, they require rapid emotions, startling
passages--truths or errors brilliant enough to rouse them up, and to
plunge them at once, as if by violence, into the midst of a subject.

Why should I say more? or who does not understand what is about to
follow, before I have expressed it? Taken as a whole, literature
in democratic ages can never present, as it does in the periods of
aristocracy, an aspect of order, regularity, science, and art; its form
will, on the contrary, ordinarily be slighted, sometimes despised. Style
will frequently be fantastic, incorrect, overburdened, and loose--almost
always vehement and bold. Authors will aim at rapidity of execution,
more than at perfection of detail. Small productions will be more
common than bulky books; there will be more wit than erudition, more
imagination than profundity; and literary performances will bear marks
of an untutored and rude vigor of thought--frequently of great variety
and singular fecundity. The object of authors will be to astonish rather
than to please, and to stir the passions more than to charm the taste.
Here and there, indeed, writers will doubtless occur who will choose
a different track, and who will, if they are gifted with superior
abilities, succeed in finding readers, in spite of their defects or
their better qualities; but these exceptions will be rare, and even
the authors who shall so depart from the received practice in the main
subject of their works, will always relapse into it in some lesser
details.

I have just depicted two extreme conditions: the transition by which a
nation passes from the former to the latter is not sudden but gradual,
and marked with shades of very various intensity. In the passage which
conducts a lettered people from the one to the other, there is almost
always a moment at which the literary genius of democratic nations has
its confluence with that of aristocracies, and both seek to establish
their joint sw