or aught of
evidence given to the contrary; at any rate, five at once, five mortal
tragedies, (so puppy-fashion born and drowned,) must, however carelessly
executed, have been the offspring of no common mind. Again, how often is
not a laborious historiographer, particularly if of contrary politics,
dismissed with immediate contempt, because, perchance, in his three full
volumes, he has admitted two false dates, or haply mistakes the
christened name of some Spanish admiral! Once more, how continually are
not critical judgments falsified by the very extracts on which they
rest! how often the pet passage of one review is the stock butt of
another! Here you will say is cure and malady together, like viper's fat
and fang: I trow not; mainly because not one man in a thousand takes the
trouble to judge for himself. But it is needless to enumerate such
instances; every man's conscience or his memory will supply examples
wholesale: therefore, maltreated authors, bear witness to your own
wrongs: jealously regarded by a struggling brotherhood, cruelly baited
by self-constituted critics, the rejected of publishers, the victimized
by booksellers, the garbled in statement, misinterpreted in meaning,
suspected of friends, persecuted by foes--"O that mine enemy would write
a book!" It is to put a neck into a noose, to lie quietly in the grove
of Dr. Guillot's humane prescription: or, if not quite so tragical as
this, it is at least to sit voluntarily in the stocks 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 think