ng 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 have 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 e