of the "New York Herald" and "Tribune," or the marvellous
inanities about the past, present, and future, which figure in an
indescribable list of duodecimo fiction, theology, and popular science.

But there is nothing so useless as to protest against a universal
fashion. Every epoch must work out its own problem in its own way; and
it may be that it is appointed unto mankind to work through all possible
mistakes as the condition of finally attaining the truth. The only way
is, to encourage the spirit of every age, to hurry on the climax. The
practical _reductio ad absurdum_ and consequent explosion will soon
accomplish themselves.

But a more palpable reason against protesting is, that literature in its
different branches, now as ever, commands the services of the finest
minds. It is the literary character, of which the elder Disraeli has
written the natural history, which now as ever creates the books, the
magazines, the newspapers. That sanctified bookworm was the first to
codify the laws, customs, habits, and idiosyncrasies of literary men. He
was the Justinian of the life of genius. He wandered in abstraction
through the deserted alcoves of libraries, studying and creating the
political economy of thought. What long diversities of character, what
mysterious realms of experience, what wild waywardness of heavenly
endowments, what heroism of inward struggle, what shyness towards
society, what devotion to the beckoning ideal of art, what defeats and
what triumphs, what sufferings and joys, both in excess, were revealed
by him, the great political economist of genius! In his apostolic view,
genius alone consecrated literature, and made a literary life sacred.
Genius was to him that peculiar and spontaneous devotion to letters
which made its possessor indifferent to everything else. For a man
without this heavenly stamp to engage in literature was simply for him
to rush upon his fate, and become a public nuisance. Literature in its
very nature is precarious, and must be plucked from the brink of fate,
from the mouth of the dragon. The literary man runs the risk of being
destroyed in a thousand ways. He has no track laid, no instituted aids,
no specified course of action. The machineries of life are not for him.
He enters into no one of the departments of human routine. He has no
relations with the course of the dull world; he is not quite a man, as
the world goes, and not at all an angel, as the celestials see. He must