s 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 to write a book;
learn experimentally how difficult, yet relieving; how nervous, yet
gladdening; how ungracious, yet very sweet; how worldly-foolish, yet
most wise; how conversant with scorn, yet how noble and ennobling an
attribute of man, is--authorship.

All this rhetoric, impatient friend--and be a friend still, whether
writer, reviewer, or unauthorial--serves at my most expeditious pace,
opposing notions considered, to introduce what is (till to-morrow, or
perhaps the next coming minute, but at any rate for this flitting
instant of time,) my last notion of possible, but not probable,
authorship: a rhodomontade oration, rather than an essay, after my own
desultory and yet determinate fashion, to have been entituled--so is it
spelled by act of parliament, and therefore let us in charity hope
rightly--to have been entituled then,

THE AUTHOR'S TRIBUNAL;

A COURT OF APPEAL AGAINST AMATEUR AND CONNOISSEUR CRITICISMS:

and (the present being the next minute whereof I