gs or other,--say
Homer or Sophocles, Goethe or Scott (only let them be big enough, no
matter what). Come, you shall be Byron or Pope, which you choose: I'll
be Coleridge, and both shall write mutual reviews.' So they both (as
mere strangers) before many days send each other a cord of anonymous
bays. Each piling his epithets, smiles in his sleeve to see what his
friend can be made to believe; each, reading the other's unbiased
review, thinks--Here's pretty high praise, but no more than my due.
Well, we laugh at them both, and yet make no great fuss when the same
farce is acted to benefit us. Even I, who, it asked, scarce a month
since, what Fudge meant, should have answered, the dear Public's
critical judgment, begin to think sharp-witted Horace spoke sooth when
he said that the Public _sometimes_ hit the truth.

In reading these lines, you perhaps have a vision of a person in pretty
good health and condition; and yet, since I put forth my primary
edition, I have been crushed, scorched, withered, used up and put down
(by Smith with the cordial assistance of Brown), in all, if you put any
faith in my rhymes, to the number of ninety-five several times, and,
while I am writing,--I tremble to think of it, for I may at this moment
be just on the brink of it,--Molybdostom, angry at being omitted, has
begun a critique,--am I not to be pitied?[1]

Now I shall not crush _them_ since, indeed, for that matter, no pressure
I know of could render them flatter; nor wither, nor scorch them,--no
action of fire could make either them or their articles drier; nor waste
time in putting them down--I am thinking not their own self-inflation
will keep them from sinking; for there's this contradiction about the
whole bevy,--though without the least weight, they are awfully heavy.
No, my dear honest bore, _surdo fabulam narras_, they are no more to me
than a rat in the arras. I can walk with the Doctor, get facts from the
Don, or draw out the Lambish quintessence of John, and feel nothing more
than a half-comic sorrow, to think that they all will be lying to-morrow
tossed carelessly up on the waste-paper shelves, and forgotten by all
but their half-dozen selves. Once snug in my attic, my fire in a roar, I
leave the whole pack of them outside the door. With Hakluyt or Purchas I
wander away to the black northern seas or barbaric Cathay; get _fou_
with O'Shanter, and sober me then with that builder of brick-kilnish
dramas, rare Ben; snuff Herber