e industry, unexampled patience,
and powers of mind very far above what are commonly attributed to them,
I, for my humble judgment, would give our periodical journalists their
honourable due: I am playing no Aberdeenshire game of mutual scratching;
I am too hardened now in the ways of print to be much more than
indifferent as to common praise or censure; that honey-moon is over with
me, when a laudatory article in some kindly magazine sent a thrill from
eye to heart, from heart to shoe-sole understanding: I no longer feel
rancorous with inveterate wrath against a poor editor whose faint
praise, impotent to d---, has yet abundant force to induce a hearty
return of the compliment: like some case-hardened rock, so little while
ago but soft young coral, the surges may lash me, but leave no mark; the
sun may shine, but cannot melt me. Argal, as the clown says, is my
verdict honest: and further now to prove it so, shall come the
limitations.

With all my gratitude and right good feeling to our diurnal and
hebdomadal amusers and instructors, I cannot but consider that gazette
and newspaper reviewers are insufficient and unsatisfactory judges of
literature, if not indeed sometimes erring guides to the public taste;
the main cause of this consisting in the essential rapidity of their
composition. There is not--from the multiplicity of business to be got
through, there cannot be--adequate time allowed for any thing like
justice to the claims of each author. Periodicals that appear at longer
intervals are in all reason more or less excepted from this objection;
but by the daily and weekly majority, the labours of a life-time are
cursorily glanced at, hastily judged from some isolated passage,
summarily found laudable or guilty; and this weak opinion, strongly
enough expressed as some compensation in solid superstructure for the
sandiness of its foundations, is circulated by thousands over all
corners of the habitable world. To say that the public (those so-called
reviewers of reviews, but wiser to be looked on only as perusers,)
balance all such false verdicts, might indeed be true in the long run,
but unfortunately it is not: for first, no run at all, far less a long
one, is permitted to the persecuted production; and next, it is
notorious, that people think very much as they are told to think. Now, I
have already stated at too much length that I have no personalities to
complain of, no self-interests to serve: for the past I hav