y those young authors who
are coming before the public in the flutter of their first or early
appearance, and are in the trembling delirium of stage-fright already.
Before you write that brilliant notice of some alliterative Angelina's
book of verses, I wish you would try this experiment.

Take half a sheet of paper and copy upon it any of Angelina's
stanzas,--the ones you were going to make fun of, if you will. Now go to
your window, if it is a still day, open it, and let the half-sheet of
paper drop on the outside. How gently it falls through the soft air,
always tending downwards, but sliding softly, from side to side,
wavering, hesitating, balancing, until it settles as noiselessly as a
snow-flake upon the all-receiving bosom of the earth! Just such would
have been the fate of poor Angelina's fluttering effort, if you had left
it to itself. It would have slanted downward into oblivion so sweetly
and softly that she would have never known when it reached that harmless
consummation.

Our epizoic literature is becoming so extensive that nobody is safe from
its ad infinitum progeny. A man writes a book of criticisms. A
Quarterly Review criticises the critic. A Monthly Magazine takes up the
critic's critic. A Weekly Journal criticises the critic of the critic's
critic, and a daily paper favors us with some critical remarks on the
performance of the writer in the Weekly, who has criticised the critical
notice in the Monthly of the critical essay in the Quarterly on the
critical work we started with. And thus we see that as each flea "has
smaller fleas that on him prey," even the critic himself cannot escape
the common lot of being bitten. Whether all this is a blessing or a
curse, like that one which made Pharaoh and all his household run to
their toilet-tables, is a question about which opinions might differ.
The physiologists of the time of Moses--if there were vivisectors other
than priests in those days--would probably have considered that other
plague, of the frogs, as a fortunate opportunity for science, as this
poor little beast has been the souffre-douleur of experimenters and
schoolboys from time immemorial.

But there is a form of criticism to which none will object. It is
impossible to come before a public so alive with sensibilities as this we
live in, with the smallest evidence of a sympathetic disposition, without
making friends in a very unexpected way. Everywhere there are minds
tossing on th