many shotten herrings at a fisherman's hut, how is the race to be renewed, and who is to satisfy the public with its myriad mouths gasping upwards in the hungry air, and roaring for food? It is an awful question. I pause for a reply. Editors and booksellers have committed a great mistake: paying for our contributions by the sheet instead of their intrinsic weight, they have offered a premium for adulterating the commodity of which they are the purchasers. Dilution and dilatation are tempting processes, when there is no standard gauge or measure. Beating out our guineas into gold leaf, and spreading them over as much surface as possible, we care not for the thinness and poorness of the article, provided it sparkles enough to have a faint appearance of gold. High prices have certainly brought great talents into the field of periodical competition, but eminence is always the precursor of corruption; an indiscriminate patronage must in the end degrade, rather than exalt, literature; for he who can get paid for glass beads and trinkets, will not take much pains to search for diamonds. South, when Queen Anne objected to the shortness of one of his sermons, replied that he should have made it shorter if he had had more time. All our time is employed in elongation and diffusion. We are moneyspinners, and support ourselves by a thread of marvellous tenuity. For my own part, I can conscientiously declare, that no one would be more terse, pointed, brief, and apophthegmatical than myself—if I could afford it. My poverty, and not my will, consents: poverty, be it understood, not of the pate, but of the purse. Modestly speaking, I consider myself to be a good Dr. Donne spoilt,—and spoilt, too, by encouragement!! Like over-watered cauliflowers, instead of forming a compact productive head, we shoot out all our strength into as many leaves as we can. Insurmountable as it is, the difficulty of finding subjects is not the only one; the manner in which we should treat them is equally embarrassing. There are but a limited number of styles, and they are all engrossed by masters of the respective arts. Some I am too wise to attempt, for I would not fall into the error of the French Atall, "qui gatoit l'esprit qu'il avoit, en voulant avoir ce qu'il n'avoit pas."-The acute, close, and metaphysical-Mr. Table-talk has it all to himself;-the polished, elaborate, and euphonous-Geoffrey Crayon, Esq. has deservedly obtained full possession of the public ear; -the light, smart, and sparkling-Grimm's Ghost rises with twenty trenchant quiddets in his head, and pushes me from my stool: and so I might continue through all the letters of the alphabet, every one of which is the hieroglyphic of some peculiar excellence. Voltaire says "ideas are like beards: children have none; we acquire them as we advance in life;" but what is the use of possessing them, if the space for their developement has been usurped by previous occupants? The literary table is full-there is no room for me, and all the guests, without exception, (confound their dexterity!) seem incomparably expert at the carving of their respective dishes. It is really shameful that there should be so much good writing abroad! In the most obscure publications one encounters prose and verse that would have established a first-rate reputation fifty years ago. At that happy period it was easy to be a Triton among the minnows; now-a-days one actually runs a risk of being a minnow among the Tritons. This comes of universal education. What an awful responsibility attaches to Lancaster and Dr. Bell!-it would have been but decent in them to caution their scholars not to write so well, and interfere in this scandalous manner with the regular practitioners. For my own part, were it not that it would look like an affectation of singularity, now that every body is an author, I would leave Apollo to dry up my ink, cut my pen into a tooth-pick, forswear essaywriting, cease to publish, and float down the stream of life "Like ships transported with the tide, Which in their passage leave no print behind." "A wise man," says Lord Chesterfield, "will live at least as much within his wit as his income:" I am determined to do both, and keep my good things to myself, for I am fairly tired of alembicizing my intellect, and as an earnest of my sincerity I thus crumple up the sheet on which I have been scribbling, and cast it into the grate. P. S. Guess my amazement, most unexpected reader, when I found, upon my accidentally calling in Conduit-street, that the preceding paper was actually set up in the press! My servant having had directions to preserve the least scrap enriched with my invaluable lucubrations, had found and brought it to me for orders; and on my pettishly exclaiming that he might throw it to the devil, the blockhead, mistaking my meaning, conveyed it, as he had done many others, to the printer's devil. I have only had time to give it the title it now bears, and to add this explanatory postscript, which enables it to make its own apology. THE FLOWER THAT FEELS NOT SPRING. FROM the prisons dark of the circling bark From the lark and linnet, the blackbird and thrush. The butterfly springs on its new-wove wings, To light and life from the darkness leaping; What renders me sad when all nature glad The heart of each living creature cheers? I laid in the bosom of earth a blossom, And water'd its bed with a father's tears; That eye, whose soft blue of the firmament's hue Such as angels shake from their sunny wings,- Yet the blaze sublime of thy virtue's prime, Brightens the dew which at last it dries:— When I think where thy spirit has wing'd its way. So wither we all-so flourish and fall, Like the flowers and weeds that in churchyards wave; Our leaves we spread over comrades dead, And blossom and bloom with our root in the grave;― Springing from earth, into earth we are thrust, Ashes to ashes and dust to dust! If death's worst smart is to feel that we part It softens his sting to know that we wing Our flight to the friends who have gone before; |