ing in the papers, but in a side-winded way,
yet you can trace them always at work, through the daily, weekly,
monthly periodicals, in desperate exertion to attract public attention.
They have at their head one sublime genius, whom they swear by, and they
admire him the more, the more incomprehensible and oracular he appears
to the rest of mankind.

These are the men who cultivate extensive tracts of forehead, and are
deeply versed in the effective display of depending ringlets and
ornamental whiskers; they dress in black, with white _chokers_, and you
will be sure to find a lot of them at evening parties of the middling
sort of doctors, or the better class of boarding-houses.

This class numbers not merely literary men, but actors, artists,
adventuring politicians, small scientifics, and a thousand others, who
have not energy or endurance to work their way in solitary labour, or
who feel that they do not possess the power to go alone.

Public men in London appear naked at the bar of public opinion; laced
coats, ribands, embroidery, titles, avail nothing, because these things
are common, and have the common fate of common things, to be cheaply
estimated. The eye is satiated with them, they come like shadows, so
depart; but they do not feed the eye of the mind; the understanding is
not the better for such gingerbread; we are compelled to look out for
some more substantial nutriment, and we try the inward man, and test his
capacity. Instead of measuring his bumps, like a landsurveyor, we
dissect his brain, like an anatomist; we estimate him, whether he be
high or low, in whatever department of life, not by what he says he can
do, or means to do, but by what he _has_ done. By this test is every man
of talent tried in London; this is his grand, his formal difficulty, to
get the opportunity of showing what he can do, of being put into
circulation, of having the chance of being tested, like a shilling, by
the _ring_ of the customer and the _bite_ of the critic; for the
opportunity, the chance to edge in, the chink to _wedge_ in, the
_purchase_ whereon to work the length of his lever, he must be ever on
the watch; for the sunshine blink of encouragement, the April shower of
praise, he must await the long winter of "hope deferred" passing away.
Patience, the _courage_ of the man of talent, he must exert for many a
dreary and unrewarded day; he must see the quack and the pretender lead
an undiscerning public by the nose, and s