dering in the breasts of all its members, the "great silent souls" — to borrow a phrase of Mr. Carlyle — who belong to what we may call the unintellectual class. It should serve as a wholesome caution to the literary minority, who are too apt to forget — because, forsooth, they can make their side of the dispute sound the loudest — that there is this balanced conflict going on, and to imagine that the fighting is all on one side, that they have now nothing more to do than to inflict the proper chastisement upon their opponents. Nothing can exceed the depth of their error upon this and kindred questions; a natural error, perhaps, because they are here concerned with the subject of their own influence and importance in the world. What the literary man is pleased to call (euphemistically) fame or reputation arising from his successes is by this very term bookworm exposed at its true valuation in the eyes of the laity. When expanded into its full meaning — for the utterances of the silent class are as concise and pregnant as those of an oracle — the word seems to express some such sentence as this addressed to the man of letters: You are a poor creature, who, from the unkindness either of nature or fortune, have failed past all hope of success in the real efforts of life; you have never been an athlete, a maker of scores at cricket, or a rower in university eights; you have shown no skill as a sportsman; and, as you grew in years, you did not grow in your knowledge of horseflesh or in your discrimination of vintages. You are letting the years pass over you without having learnt or done one of the things which it is the common desire of mankind to learn and do. You never won a Derby or a shooting-match, or made a great "bag" or a good "book;" you have not got so much as a single cup or a single brush to show that your life has not been lived in vain. But, to avoid the stings of conscience, and a too crushing sense of defeat, you bury yourself in the frivolous and fanciful pursuits of literature or science, and surround yourself with a clique of unhappy wretches of the same mould — lepers and outcasts in reality — who agree in pretending that their unhealthy hues are the natural complexion of man in his highest development.
This is the real opinion of the world — the vast majority in any country — concerning fame and literary reputation. Balzac said that critics were les impuissants qui manquent à leur début; most men would go further and apply the phrase to everybody who wields a pen. By sedulously shutting his eyes to the truth and courting the society of his kind, such as can be found in large towns, the bookworm may for a time succeed in forgetting that he is not a hero, but a sort of pariah among his fellowmen. Indeed, as has been said, his blindness sometimes leads him to the length of railing against the unlearned, as though he were carrying the whole world along with him. For a proper awakening, and in order that society may have its full revenge upon him, let the bookworm be tracked out alone, and taken away to spend a few months in the midst of an agricultural neighborhood; that is to say, let him be put for once among a people occupied not with the fictitious interests of imagination or of the past, but with those real and constantly recurring interests which attach to turnips considered either in respect of their own qualities or of the quantity of game to which they will afford a shelter, the conflicting merits of different kinds of guns and cartridges, the capacities and the ailments of the horse and the dog, etc. In the midst of these things he soon discovers how remote his speculations have lain from the practical business of life. To such varied subjects will be added about nightfall disquisitions upon the purchase and history of wines and of cigars — is he more at home here? — or upon that never-failing topic, the history of the coloring of a meerschaum pipe. Among the other sex, besides the universal and purely feminine interests of dress and babies, some local disturbance — the dispute between the clergyman and his archdeacon, between the schoolmaster and the Dissenting minister — involves, it is evident, some deepest considerations of policy or of religion, but so intricately that they are quite inexplicable to the uninstructed layman.
At first, with a sinful hankering after forbidden pleasures, our bookworm hopes to gain some consolation from his accustomed companions. He carries the accursed thing in pocket volumes about with him, and tries to steal away into arbors or unused morning rooms. But he is oppressed by a sense of guilt and a constant fear of detection, which eat into and in time quite wear away his power of enjoyment. There are some hosts and hostesses who feel it to be a reflection upon their character if their guest is seen occupied with a book, deeming that nothing but the extremity of dulness could ever bring one
