ars left to
him. Taking all time together, since formerly authors wrote less
abundantly than now, he will not produce more than one work in five
years, that is, five works in his lifetime of fifty years. The
conclusion to which this rather precarious investigation thus brings us
is, that the original cost of an average book is ten years of a human
life. And yet these ten years make but the mere suggestion of the book.
The suggestion must be developed by an army of printers, sellers, and
librarians. What other institution in the world is there but the
Bibliotheque Imperiale, to the mere suggestion of which ten millions of
laborious years have been devoted?

Startling considerations present themselves. If there were no other
_argumentum ad absurdum_ to demonstrate some fundamental perversity and
absurdity in literature, it might be suspected from the fact that Nature
herself gives so little encouragement to it. Nobody is born an author.
The art of writing, common as it is, is not indigenous in man, but is
acquired by a nearly universal martyrdom of youth. If it had been
providentially designed that the function of any considerable portion of
mankind should have been to write books, we cannot suppose that an
economical Deity would have failed to create them with innate skill in
language, general knowledge, and penmanship. These accomplishments have
to be learned by every writer, yet writers are numberless. They are
mysteries which must be painfully encountered by every one at the
vestibule of the temple of literature, which nevertheless is thronged.
Surely, had this importance and prevalence been attached to them in the
Divine scheme, they would have been born in us like the senses, or would
blossom spontaneously in us, like the corollal growths of Faith and
Conscience. We should have been created in a condition of literary
capacity, and thus have been spared the alphabetical torture of
childhood, and the academic depths of philological despair. Twenty-five
years of preliminaries might have been avoided by changing the peg in
the scale of creation, and the studies of the boy might have begun where
now they end. Twenty-five years in the span of life would thus have been
saved, had what must be a universal acquirement been incorporated into
the original programme of human nature.

Or had the Deity appreciated literature as we do, He would probably have
written out the universe in some snug little volume, some miniature
ser