e been well
entreated; and for the future, supposing such an unlikelihood as more
hypothetical books, I am hard, bold, sanguine, stoical; while, as for
the present, though I refuse not my gauntlet to any man, my visor shall
be raised by none. But I enter the list for others, my kinsmen in
composing. Authors, to speak it generally, are an ill-used race, because
judged hastily, often superciliously, for evil or for good. It is
impossible for the poor public, (who, besides having to earn daily
bread, have to wade through all the daily papers,) from mere lack of
hours in the day, to entertain any opinions of their own about a book or
books: the money to buy them is one objection, the time to read them
another; to say less of the capacity, the patience, and the will.
Without question, they are guided by their teachers; and the grand fault
of these is, their everlasting hurry.

At another necessary failing of reviewers I would only delicately hint.
The royal We is very imposing; for example, the king of magazines, No.
134, (need I name it?) informs us, p. 373, "We happen to have now in
wear a good long coat of imperial gray," &c.; and some fifteen lines
lower down, "We are now mending our pen with a small knife," and so
forth: now all this grandiloquence serves to conceal the individual; and
to reduce my other great objection to a single letter, let us only
recollect that this powerful, this despotic We, is, being interpreted,
nothing but an I by itself, a simple scribe, a single and plebeian
number one. A mere unit, an anonymous, irresponsible unit, dissects in a
quarter of an hour the grand result of some ten years; and this
momentary influence on one man's mind, (perhaps wearied, or piqued, or
biased, or haply unskilled in the point at issue, but at all events
inevitably in a hurry to jump at a conclusion,) this light accidental
impression is sounded forth to the ends of the earth, and leads public
opinion in a verdict of thunder. And as for yon impertinent
parenthesis--or pertinent, as some will say--give me grace thus blandly
to suggest a possibility. The mighty editorial We, upon whose
authoritative tones the world's opinion will probably be pivoted--whose
pen by casual ridicule or as casual admiration makes or mars the fortune
of some pains-taking literary labourer--whose dictum carelessly
dispenses local honour or disgrace, and has before now by sharp
sarcasms, speaking daggers though using none, even killed more than