ent therein?

The estimate must be highly speculative. Some books have cost a lifetime
and a heartbreak; others have been written at leisure in a week, and
without an emotion. Some are born from the martyrdom of a thinker to
fire the genius of a populace; others are the coruscations of joy, and
have a smile for their immortal heir. Some have made but the slightest
momentary ripple in human affairs; others, first gathering eddies about
themselves, have swept forward in grand currents, engrossing for
centuries whole departments of human energy. Thousands publish and are
forgotten before they die. Spinoza published after his death and is not
yet understood.

We will begin with the destined bibliomacher at the time of his
assumption of short clothes. The alphabet is his first professional
torture, and that only ushers him upon the gigantic task of learning to
read and write his own language. Experience shows that this miracle of
memory and associative reason may be in the main accomplished by the
time he is eight years old. Thus far in his progress towards book-making
he has simply got his fingers hold of the pen. He has next to run the
gauntlet of the languages, sciences, and arts, to pass through the epoch
of the scholar, with satchel under his arm, with pale cheek, an eremite
and ascetic in the religion of Cadmus. At length, at about twenty years
of age, he leaves the university, not a master, but a bachelor of
liberal studies. But thus far he has laid only the foundation, has
acquired only rudiments and generalities, has only served his
apprenticeship to letters. God gave mind and nature, but art has
furnished him a new capacity and a new world,--the capacity to read, and
the world of books. He has simply acquired a new nature, a psychological
texture of letters, but the artificial _tabula rasa_ has yet to be
filled. Twenty obstetrical years have at last made him a literary
animal, have furnished him the abstract conditions of authorship; but he
has yet his life to save, and his fortune to make in literature. He is
born into the mystic fraternity of readers and writers, but the special
studies and experiences which fit him for anything, which make a book
possible, are still in the future. He will be fortunate, if he gets
through with them, and gets his first volume off his hands by the age of
thirty. Authors are the shortest-lived of men. Their average years are
less than fifty. Our bibliomacher has therefore twenty ye