ensive to Martineau and Malthus.
But as to "books"--common enough, too, smirks gentle reader: pardon,
courteous sir, most rare--at least in my sense; I speak not of flat
current shillings, but the bold medallions of ancient Syracuse; I heed
not the dull thousands of minted gold and silver, but the choice
coin-sculptures of Larissa and Tarentum. There do indeed flow hourly,
from an ever-welling press, rivers of words; there are indeed shoaling
us up on all sides a throng of well-bound volumes--novels, histories,
poems, plays, memoirs, and so forth--to all appearance, books: but if by
"books" be intended originality of matter, independent arguments, water
turned wine, by the miracle of right-thinking, and not a mere
re-decantering of dregs from other vessels--these many masqueraded
forms, these multiplied images of little-varied likenesses, these
Protean herds, will not stay to be counted, nor abide judgment, nor
brook scrutiny, but will merge and melt by thousands into the one, or
the two, real, original, sterling books. We live in a monopolylogue of
authorship: an idea goes forth to the world's market-place well dressed
from the wardrobe of some master-mind; it greets the public with a
captivating air, and straightway becomes the rage; it seems epidemical;
it comes out simultaneously as a piece of political economy, a
cookery-book, a tragedy, a farce, a novel, a religious experience, an
abstract _ism_, or a concrete _ology_; till the poor worn-out,
dissipated shadow of a thought looks so feeble, thin, fashionably
affected and fashionably infected, that its honest, bluff old father,
for very shame, disowns it. Thus has it come to pass, that one or two
minds, in this golden age of scribbling, have, to speak radically, been
the true originators of a million volumes, which haply shall have sprung
from the seed of some singular book, or of books counted in the dual.

Indignant authors, be not merciless on my candour: I confess too much
whereof I hold you guilty; I am one of yourselves, and I question not
that few of you can beat me in a certain sort of--I will say,
unintended, plagiarism; you are thieves--patience--I thieve from
thieves; Diogenes cannot see me any more than you; you copy phrases, I
am perpetually and unconsciously filching thoughts; my entomological
netted-scissors, wherewith I catch those small fowl on the wing, are
always within reach; you will never find me without well-tenanted
pill-boxes in my pocket, a