alliterative signatures,
beginning with Annie Aureole and ending with Zoe Zenith,)--when "The
Ragbag" has stolen your piece, after carefully scratching your name
out,--when "The Nut-cracker" has thought you worth shelling, and strung
the kernel of your cleverest poem,--then, and not till then, you may
consider the presumption against you, from the fact of your rhyming
tendency, as called in question, and let our friends hear from you, if
you think it worth while. You may possibly think me too candid, and
even accuse me of incivility; but let me assure you that I am not half
so plain-spoken as Nature, nor half so rude as Time. If you prefer the
long jolting of public opinion to the gentle touch of friendship, try
it like a man. Only remember this,--that, if a bushel of potatoes is
shaken in a market-cart without springs to it, the small potatoes
always get to the bottom.

Believe me, etc., etc.

* * * * *

I always think of verse-writers, when I am in this vein; for these are
by far the most exacting, eager, self-weighing, restless, querulous,
unreasonable literary persons one is like to meet with. Is a young man
in the habit of writing verses? Then the presumption is that he is an
inferior person. For, look you, there are at least nine chances in ten
that he writes _poor_ verses. Now the habit of chewing on rhymes
without sense and soul to match them is, like that of using any other
narcotic, at once a proof of feebleness and a debilitating agent. A
young man can get rid of the presumption against him afforded by his
writing verses only by convincing us that they are verses worth
writing.

All this sounds hard and rough, but, observe, it is not addressed to
any individual, and of course does not refer to any reader of these
pages. I would always treat any given young person passing through the
meteoric showers which rain down on the brief period of adolescence
with great tenderness. God forgive us, if we ever speak harshly to
young creatures on the strength of these ugly truths, and so, sooner or
later, smite some tender-souled poet or poetess on the lips who might
have sung the world into sweet trances, had we not silenced the
matin-song in its first low breathings! Just as my heart yearns over
the unloved, just so it sorrows for the ungifted who are doomed to the
pangs of an undeceived self-estimate. I have always tried to be gentle
with the most hopeless cases. My experience, howe