ks with Sir Hudibras,
and dare the world's contempt; while fashionable--or unfashionable
idiots, who are scarcely capable of a grammatical answer to a dinner
invitation, (those formidably confounded he's and him's!)--think
themselves privileged to join some inane laugh against a clever, but not
yet famous, author, because, forsooth, one character in his novel may be
an old acquaintance, or one epithet in a long poem may be weak,
indelicate, tasteless, or foolish, or one philosophical fact in an essay
is misstated, or one statistical conclusion seems to be exaggerated. It
is perfectly paltry to behold stupid fellows, whose intellects against
your most ordinary scribe vary from a rush-light to a "long four," as
compared with a roasting, roaring kitchen-fire, affecting contemptuously
to look down upon some unjustly neglected or mercilessly castigated
labourer in the brick-fields of literature, for not being--can he help
it?--a first-rate author, or because one reviewer in seven thinks he
might have done his subject better justice. Take my word for it--if
indeed I can be a fair witness--the man who has written a book, is above
the unwriting average, and, as such, should be ranked mentally above
them: no light research, and tact, and industry, and head-and-hand
labour, are sufficient for a volume; even certain stolid performances in
print do not shake my judgment; for arrant blockheads as sundry authors
undoubtedly are, the average (mark, not all men, but the average)
unwriting man is an author's intellectual inferior. All men, however
well capable, have not perchance the appetite, nor the industry, nor the
opportunity to fabricate a volume; nor, supposing these requisites, the
moral courage (for moral courage, if not physical, must form part of an
author's mind,) to publish the lucubration: but "I magnify mine office"
above the unnumbered host of unwriting, uninformed, loose, unlettered
gentry, who (as full of leisure as a cabbage, and as overflowing with
redundant impudence as any Radical mob,) mainly tend to form by their
masses the average penless animal-man, who could not hold a candle to
any the most mediocre of the Marsyas-used authors of haply this week's
journals. Spare them, victorious Apollos, spare! if libels that diminish
wealth be punishable, is there no moral guilt in those legalized libels
that do their utmost to destroy a character for wisdom, wit, learning,
industry, and invention?--Critical flayer, try thou