eauty no
lover's hand has dropped upon the sacred waters of Siloa, like the
Hindoo's garland on her Ganges; prolix, vain, ephemeral letters
(especially enveloped penny-posters)--and sparing only some few redolent
of truth, wisdom, and affection--your bulky majority of flippant trash,
staid advices, dunnings, hoaxings, lyings, and slanderings, degrade you
to a lower rank than that we take on us to designate as "writing."

And what, O what--"how poor is he that hath not patience!"--shall we
predicate of the average viscera of circulating libraries?--abominable
viscera!--isn't that the word, my young Hippocrates?--A parley--a
parley! and the terms of truce are these: If this present pastime of
mine (for pastime it is, so spurn not at its logic,) be mercifully
looked on by you, lady novelists and male dittoes--yet truly there are
giants in your ranks, as Scott, and Ward, and Hugo, and Le Sage,
towering above ten thousand pigmies--if I be spared your censures
well-deserved, interchangeably as toward your authorships will I
exercise the charitable wisdom of silence: a white flag or a white
feather is my best alternative in soothing or avoiding so terrible a
host; and verily, to speak kinder of those whose wit, and genius, and
graphic powers have so smoothed this old world's wrinkled face of care,
many brilliant, many clever, many well-intended caterers to public
amusement, throng your ill-ordered ranks: still, there are numbered to
your shame as followers of the fool's-cap standard, the huge corrupting
mass of depraved moralists, meagre trash-inditers, treacherous
scandal-mongers, men about town who immortalize their shame, and the
dull, pernicious school of feather-brained Romancists: and take this
sentence for a true one, a _verum-dictum_. But enough, there are others,
and those not few, even far less veniable; ye priers into family
secrets--fawning, false guests at the great man's open house, eagerly
jotting down with paricidal pen the unguarded conversation of the
hospitable board--shame on your treason, on its wages, and its fame! ye
countless gatherers and disposers of other men's stuff; chiels amang us
takin' notes, an' faith, to prent 'em too, perpetually, without
mitigation or remorse; ye men of paste and scissors, who so often
falsely, feebly, faithlessly, and tastelessly are patching into a
Harlequin whole the _disjecta membra_ of some great hacked-up
reputation; can such as ye are tell me what it is to write? Writ