g fame or fortune, very well, so long as this
recompense does not intoxicate. The peril is, that all temporary
applause is vitiated by uncertainty, and may be leading you right or
wrong. Goethe wrote to Schiller, "We make money by our poor books."

The impression is somehow conveyed to the young, that there exists
somewhere a circle of cultivated minds, gifted with discernment, who can
distinguish at a glance between Shakespeare and Tupper. One may doubt
the existence of any such contemporary tribunal. Certainly there is none
such in America. Provided an author says something noticeable, and obeys
the ordinary rules of grammar and spelling, his immediate public asks
little more; and if he attempts more, it is an even chance that it leads
him away from favor. Indeed, within the last few years, it has come to
be a sign of infinite humor to dispense with even these few rules, and
spell as badly as possible. Yet even if you went to London or to Paris
in search of this imaginary body of critics, you would not find them;
there also you would find the transient and the immortal confounded
together, and the transient often uppermost. Even a foreign country is
not always, as has been said, a contemporaneous posterity. It is said
that no American writer was ever so warmly received in England as
Artemus Ward. It is only the slow alembic of the years that finally
eliminates from this vast mass of literature its few immortal drops, and
leaves the rest to perish.

I know of no tonic more useful for a young writer than to read
carefully, in the English Reviews of sixty or seventy years ago, the
crushing criticisms on nearly every author of that epoch who has
achieved lasting fame. What cannot there be read, however, is the
sterner history of those who were simply neglected. Look, for instance,
at the career of Charles Lamb, who now seems to us a writer who must
have disarmed opposition, and have been a favorite from the first.
Lamb's "Rosamond Gray" was published in 1798, and for two years was not
even reviewed. His poems appeared during the same year. In 1815 he
introduced Talfourd to Wordsworth as his own "only admirer." In 1819 the
series of "Essays of Elia" began, and Shelley wrote to Leigh Hunt that
year: "When I think of such a mind as Lamb's, when I see how unnoticed
remain things of such exquisite and complete perfection, what should I
hope for myself, if I had not higher objects in view than fame?" These
Essays were publishe