thors. Nor will she hear of Memoirs, unless light,
sparkling, and scandalous, as nearly resembling those of Grammont as
decency will allow. Essays she abominates; nor can she exactly
understand the use of quartoes, unless, as Swift describes the merit of

"A Chrysostom to smooth his band in"--

to serve for flattening between the leaves her rumpled embroidery or
netting!

Now you are simply and respectfully asked, beloved public, what must be
the feelings of a man of genius, or of any sensible scholarly
individual, when, after devoting years of his life to a work of standard
excellence--a work such as in France would obtain him access to the
Academy, or in Russia or Prussia a pension and an order of merit--he is
told by the publisher, who in Great Britain supplies the place of these
fountains of honour and reward, that "the public of the present day has
no taste for serious reading;" for Messrs Folio and Duodecimo cannot, of
course, afford to regard a few dons of the universities, or a few county
bookclubs, parsonically presided, as representatives of the public! What
the disappointed man, thus enlightened, must think of "glorious Apollo"
when he goes to bed that night, we should be sorry to conjecture!

"The public of the present day"--_Ang._ the subscribers to the
circulating libraries--constitute, to his cultivated mind, a world
unknown. The public _he_ has been wasting his life to address, is such a
public as was addressed by Addison, by Swift, by Steele, or by the
greater writers of the days of Elizabeth. "Bless his fine wits," we
could laugh at his misconception, were we not rather inclined to cry! In
instances easy to be cited, (but that there were miching malecho in the
deed,) insult has been added to injury, and the anguish depicted in the
face of the mortified man of letters been assuaged by friendly advice to
"try his hand at something more saleable--something in the style of
Harrison Ainsworth or Peter Priggins!"

O ye Athenians! to what base uses have we come, by the influence of your
malpractices of old!

But all this is far from the blackest side of the picture. You have seen
only the fortunes of the rejected of the circulating libraries; wait
till you have studied the fate of their favourites--victims whom, like
the pet-dogs of children, the publishers force to stand on their
hind-legs, and be bedizened in their finery; or pet pussy-cats, whom
they fondle into wearing spectacles and feeding on