macaroones, instead
of pursuing their avocations as honest mousers. The favourite author of
the circulating libraries has a great deal to envy in the treadmill!

In the days when there existed a reading, in place of a skimming
public--in the days when circulating libraries were not--the writer who
followed his own devices in the choice of the subject, plot, title,
treatment, and extent of his book, and made his labour a labour of love,
had some chance of being cherished as the favourite of the fireside;
installed on the shelf, and taken down, like Goldsmith or Defoe or
Bunyan, for an hour's gossip; cried over by the young girl of the
family, diverting the holiday of the schoolboy, and exercising the
eyesight of the good old grandmother. But how is this ever to be
achieved nowadays? Who will be ever thumbed over and spelled over as
these have been?

"Invent another Vicar or another Crusoe," say the critics, "and you will
see."

We should NOT see! No bookseller would publish them, because "no
circulating library would take them;" for these bibliopoles know to a
page what will be taken. Several of them have got, and several others
have had, the conduct of a circulating library on their hands; and so
far from venturing to present a single-volumed or double-volumed work to
their subscribers, they would insist upon the dilution of the genius of
Oliver or Daniel into the adequate number of pages ere they risked paper
and print. O public! O dear, ingenuous public! Think how you might have
ceased to delight in even the cosmogony-man, if his part had been a
hundred times rehearsed in your ears; or what the matchless Lady Blarney
and the incomparable Miss Carolina Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs (I love, as
old Primrose says, to repeat the whole name) might have become, as the
"light conversationists" of three octavo volumes! Shakspeare was forced
to kill Mercutio early in the play, lest Mercutio should kill _him_. We
feel a devout conviction that Miss Carolina Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs
would have burked Goldsmith!

And then the incomparable Robinson! Conceive the interlarding of a funny
Mrs Friday to eke out the matter, with a comical king of the Cannibal
islands "to lighten the story"--according to circulating library demand!
Unhappy Defoe! thy standing in the pillory had been as nothing compared
with such a condemnation!

We beseech you, therefore, deluded public, when assured by critical
misleadment that such writers no longer e