coat-pockets, and rhymes written on scraps of paper
from the gutter in its waistcoat-pockets. No longer does it unequally
compete with clowns and jockeys for lordly recognition. No longer are
the poet and the fool court-rivals. No longer does it look forward to
the jail as an occasional natural resting-place and paradise. No longer
must the author renounce the rank and robe of a gentleman to fall from
airy regions far below the mechanical artists to the level of
clodhoppers, even whose leaden existence was a less precarious matter.
The order of scholars has ceased to be mendicant, vagabond, and eremite.
It no longer cultivates blossoms of the soul, but manufactures objects
of barter. Now is the happy literary epoch, when to be intellectual and
omniscient is the public and private duty of every man. To read
newspapers by the billion and books by the million is now the common
law. We can conceive of Disraeli moaning that the Titan interests of the
earth have overthrown the celestial hierarchy,--that the realm of genius
has been stormed by worldly workers,--that literature, like the angels,
has fallen from its first estate,--and that authors, no longer the
disinterested and suffering apostles, of art, have chosen rather to bear
the wand of power and luxury than to be inspired. We can imagine his
horror at the sacrilegious vulgarization of print, that people without
taste rush into angelic metre, that dunces and sages thrive together on
the public indiscrimination. How would he marvel to see literary
reputations born, grow old, and die within a season, the owners thereof
content to be damned or forgotten eternally for a moment's incense or an
equally fugitive shilling. Nectar and ambrosia mean to them only
meanness, larceny, sacrilege, and bread and butter.

And yet, notwithstanding the imaginary reproaches of our great literary
church-father, the most preciously endowed minds are still toiling in
letters. The sad and tortured devotion of genius still works itself out
in them. Writing is now a marvellous craft and industry. The books which
last, the books of a season, the quarterlies, monthlies, weeklies,
dailies, and even the hourlies, are among the institutions of its
fostering. Nor should that vehicle, partly of intelligence, but chiefly
of sentiment, the postal system, be unmentioned, which men and women
both patronize, each after their kind. Altogether, perhaps, in some way
or other, seven-eighths of the life of man is