will allow, in popularity. The literary idler who receives it from the library, sends it away and waits for the review in the Quarterly; and the friend, the familiar, to whom you make it a present, shuns you during the rest of your life, lest you should inquire his opinion. You see, my dear * * * * * *, I have viewed the matter on a magnificent scale. I might have checked the question at once;—I might, instead of provoking discussion, by pointing out the unfitness of such attempts, have quieted it by a gentle allusion to the inability of the attempter;—I might have exclaimed "Poetry! I am a poetaster, not a poet. Philosophy! I am a student, not a discoverer. Essays! I have wearied you already with Essays in 'Devereux,' or the 'Disowned.' Travels! Where, oh! where have I travelled?" But this is not the age in which men are so uninventive in motives as to confess to a want of genius, or a scantiness of knowledge; and consequently, I beg you to believe that I write novels, not because I cannot write any thing else, but because novels are the best possible things to be written.
We live in a strange and ominous period for literature. In books as in other manufactures, the great aim seems the abridgement of labour: the idlest work is the most charming. People will only expend their time for immediate returns of knowledge; and the wholesome and fair profit, slow, but permanent, they call tedious in letters, and speculative in politics. This eager yet slothful habit of mind, now so general,
