We may even arrive in
time at that desirable point from which a distinct view of our men
of letters may be obtained, and their respective pretensions
adjusted by the standard of a rigorous and self-sustaining criticism
alone. That their several positions are as yet properly settled;
that the posts which a vast number of them now hold are maintained
by any better tenure than that of the chicanery upon which we have
commented, will be asserted by none but the ignorant, or the parties
who have best right to feel an interest in the "good old condition
of things." No two matters can be more radically different than the
reputation of some of our prominent litterateurs as gathered from
the mouths of the people (who glean it from the paragraphs of the
papers), and the same reputation as deduced from the private
estimate of intelligent and educated men. We do not advance this
fact as a new discovery. Its truth, on the contrary, is the subject,
and has long been so, of every-day witticism and mirth.
Why not? Surely there can be few things more ridiculous than the
general character and assumptions of the ordinary critical notices
of new books! An editor, sometimes without the shadow of the commonest
attainment- often without brains, always without time- does not
scruple to give the world to understand that he is in the daily
habit of critically reading and deciding upon a flood of publications,
one-tenth of whose title pages he may possibly have turned over,
three-fourths of whose contents would be Hebrew to his most
desperate efforts at comprehension, and whose entire mass and
amount, as might be mathematically demonstrated, would be sufficient
to occupy, in the most cursory perusal, the attention of some ten or
twenty readers for a month! What he wants in plausibility, however, he
makes up in obsequiousness; what he lacks in time he supplies in
temper.
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