very fog.

Now really, good folk, all this should be amended: would that the
WE were actually plural; would that we had a well-selected
bench of literary judges; would that some higher sort of Stationers'
Hall or Athenaeum were erected into an acknowledged tribunal of an
author's merits or demerits; would that, to wish the very least, the
wholesome practice of a well-considered imprimatur were revived! Let
famous men, whose reputation is firm-fixed--our Wordsworths, Hallams,
Campbells, Crolys, Wilsons, Bulwers, and the like--decide in the case of
at least all who desire such decision. I suppose, as no one in these
selfish times will take trouble without pay, that either the judges
should be numbered among state pensioners, or that each work so
calmly examined must produce its regular fee: but these are
after-considerations; and be sure no writer will grudge a guinea for
calm, unbought, unsuspected justice bestowed upon his brain-child. Let
all those members of the tribunal, deciding by ballot, (here in an
assembly where all are good, great, and honest, I shrink not from that
word of evil omen,) judge, as far as possible, together and not
separately, of all kinds of literature: I would not have poets
sentencing all the poetry, historians all the history, novelists all the
novels, and theologists all the works upon religion; for humanity is at
the best infirm, and motives little searchable; but let all judge
equally in a sort of open court. The machinery might be difficult, and I
cannot show its workings in so slight an essay; but surely it is a
strange thing in civilization, and a stranger when we consider what
literature does for us, blessing our world or banning it--it is a wonder
and a shame that books of whatever tendency are so cast forth upon the
waters to sink or swim at hazard. I acknowledge, friend, your present
muttering, Utopian! Arcadian! Formosan! to be not ill-founded: the
sketch is a hasty one; but though it may have somewhat in common with
the vagaries of Sir Thomas More, Sir Philip Sidney, and that king in
impudence, George Psalmanazar, still I stand upon this ground, that many
an ill-used author wants protection, and that society, for its own sake
as well as his, ought to supply a court for literary reputation. Some
poor man the other day, and in a reputable journal too, had five
new-born tragedies strangled and mangled in as many lines: we need not
suppose him a Shakspeare, but he might have been one f