to speak to the point; we mean to enlighten your
understanding as by the smiting of a lucifer-match. Refrain, therefore,
from running your eye impatiently along the page, as you are doing at
this moment, in hopes of discovering, italicized, the secret of the
enigma; for we have no intention of keeping you another moment ignorant
that the monster-misery of literature is--guess! Which of you hath hit
it? The monster-misery of literature is--THE CIRCULATING LIBRARY!

In this devout conviction, devote we to the infernal gods the memory of
the Athenian republic--the first keeper of a circulating library. Every
tyro is aware that this Sams or Ebers of antiquity lent out to Ptolemy
of Egypt, for a first-rate subscription of fifteen talents, the works of
Euripides, Eschylus, and Sophocles; thereby affording a precedent for
the abominable practice, fatal to bookmakers and booksellers, which has
converted the waters of Castalia into their present disgraceful puddle!

Every scribbler of the day who has a Perryian pen in hand, is pleased to
exercise it on the decline of the drama; one of the legitimate targets
of penny-a-liners. But how inadequately are the goose quills, and
ostrich quills, phoenix quills, and roc quills, of the few standard
critics of the age, directed towards the monstrous abuse of public
patience which will render the Victorian age the sad antithesis of the
Elizabethan, in the literary history of the land! Content so long as
they can get a new work, _tale quale_, as a peg whereon to hang the
rusty garments of their erudition, not a straw care they for the
miserable decline and fall of the great empire of letters; an empire
overrun by what Goths--what Huns--what Vandals!--by the iniquitous and
barbarous hosts of circulating libraries!

It has been agreed for some centuries past, that the only modern Maecenas
is the publisher. The days of patrons are past; and the author is
forced to look for the reward of his labour to the man who, by selling
the greatest number of copies to the public, can bestow the greatest
number of pounds upon his pains. In order to augment this amount, the
bibliopole naturally consults the taste of his customers; and nearly the
sole remaining customers of the modern bookseller are--the circulating
libraries. For what man in his senses who, for an annual mulct of
half-a-dozen sovereigns, commands the whole range of modern literature,
would waste his substance in loading his house with book