Its
truckling, yet dogmatical character- its bold, unsustained, yet
self-sufficient and wholesale laudation- is becoming, more and more,
an insult to the common sense of the community. Trivial as it
essentially is, it has yet been made the instrument of the grossest
abuse in the elevation of imbecility, to the manifest injury, to the
utter ruin, of true merit. Is there any man of good feeling and of
ordinary understanding- is there one single individual among all our
readers- who does not feel a thrill of bitter indignation, apart
from any sentiment of mirth, as he calls to mind instance after
instance of the purest, of the most unadulterated quackery in letters,
which has risen to a high post in the apparent popular estimation, and
which still maintains it, by the sole means of a blustering arrogance,
or of a busy wriggling conceit, or of the most barefaced plagiarism,
or even through the simple immensity of its assumptions- assumptions
not only unopposed by the press at large, but absolutely supported
in proportion to the vociferous clamour with which they are made- in
exact accordance with their utter baselessness and untenability? We
should have no trouble in pointing out to-day some twenty or thirty
so-called literary personages, who, if not idiots, as we half think
them, or if not hardened to all sense of shame by a long course of
disingenuousness, will now blush in the perusal of these words,
through consciousness of the shadowy nature of that purchased pedestal
upon which they stand-will now tremble in thinking of the feebleness
of the breath which will be adequate to the blowing it from beneath
their feet.
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