his sort of expectation is a little
_exigeante!_

One fashionable mode of acquiring reputation is by patronising it. This
may be from various motives--real good nature, good taste, vanity, or
pride. I shall only speak of the spurious ones in this place. The quack
and the _would-be_ patron are well met. The house of the latter is a
sort of curiosity shop or _menagerie,_ where all sorts of intellectual
pretenders and grotesques, musical children, arithmetical prodigies,
occult philosophers, lecturers, _accoucheurs,_ apes, chemists, fiddlers,
and buffoons are to be seen for the asking, and are shown to the company
for nothing. The folding doors are thrown open, and display a collection
that the world cannot parallel again. There may be a few persons of
common sense and established reputation, _rari nantes in gurgite vasto,_
otherwise it is a mere scramble or lottery. The professed encourager of
_virtu_ and letters, being disappointed of the great names, sends out
into the highways for the halt, the lame, and the blind, for all who
pretend to distinction, defects, and obliquities, for all the disposable
vanity or affectation floating on the town, in hopes that, among so many
oddities, chance may bring some jewel or treasure to his door, which he
may have the good fortune to appropriate in some way to his own use,
or the credit of displaying to others. The art is to encourage rising
genius--to bring forward doubtful and unnoticed merit. You thus get a
set of novices and raw pretenders about you, whose actual productions do
not interfere with your self-love, and whose future efforts may reflect
credit on your singular sagacity and faculty for finding out talent
in the germ; and in the next place, by having them completely in your
power, you are at liberty to dismiss them whenever you will, and to
supply the deficiency by a new set of wondering, unwashed faces in a
rapid succession; an 'aiery of children,' embryo actors, artists, poets,
or philosophers. Like unfledged birds, they are hatched, nursed, and fed
by hand: this gives room for a vast deal of management, meddling, care,
and condescending solicitude; but the instant the callow brood are
fledged, they are driven from the nest, and forced to shift for
themselves in the wide world. One sterling production decides the
question between them and their patrons, and from that time they become
the property of the public. Thus a succession of importunate, hungry,
idle, overweeni