e only ask, Is it good?
when the battle has been fought, Who won? when the book comes out, Does
it read?

Authors ought not to be above being reminded that it is their first duty
to write agreeably--some very disagreeable men have succeeded in doing
so, and there is therefore no need for anyone to despair. Every author,
be he grave or gay, should try to make his book as ingratiating as
possible. Reading is not a duty, and has consequently no business to be
made disagreeable. Nobody is under any obligation to read any other
man's book.

Literature exists to please--to lighten the burden of men's lives; to
make them for a short while forget their sorrows and their sins, their
silenced hearths, their disappointed hopes, their grim futures--and those
men of letters are the best loved who have best performed literature's
truest office. Their name is happily legion, and I will conclude these
disjointed remarks by quoting from one of them, as honest a parson as
ever took tithe or voted for the Tory candidate, the Rev. George Crabbe.
Hear him in _The Frank Courtship_:--

'"I must be loved;" said Sybil; "I must see
The man in terrors, who aspires to me:
At my forbidding frown his heart must ache,
His tongue must falter, and his frame must shake;
And if I grant him at my feet to kneel,
What trembling fearful pleasure must he feel:
Nay, such the raptures that my smiles inspire,
That reason's self must for a time retire."

"Alas! for good Josiah," said the dame,
"These wicked thoughts would fill his soul with shame;
He kneel and tremble at a thing of dust!
He cannot, child:"--the child replied, "He must."'

Were an office to be opened for the insurance of literary reputations, no
critic at all likely to be in the society's service would refuse the life
of a poet who could write like Crabbe. Cardinal Newman, Mr. Leslie
Stephen, Mr. Swinburne, are not always of the same way of thinking, but
all three hold the one true faith about Crabbe.

But even were Crabbe now left unread, which is very far from being the
case, his would be an enviable fame--for was he not one of the favourite
poets of Walter Scott, and whenever the closing scene of the great
magician's life is read in the pages of Lockhart, must not Crabbe's name
be brought upon the reader's quivering lip?

To soothe the sorrow of the soothers of sorrow, to bring tears to the
eyes and smiles to the cheeks of the lords of human s