portion of his interest in the book. There is no
criticism to control the advertising enterprises of publishers and
authors, and no sufficiently intelligent reading public has
differentiated out of the confusion to encourage attempts at critical
discrimination. The organs of the great professions and technical trades
are as yet not alive to the part their readers must play in the public
life of the future, and ignore all but strictly technical publications.
A bastard criticism, written in many cases by publishers' employees, a
criticism having a very direct relation to the advertisement columns,
distributes praise and blame in the periodic press. There is no body of
great men either in England or America, no intelligence in the British
Court, that might by any form of recognition compensate the
philosophical or scientific writer for poverty and popular neglect. The
more powerful a man's intelligence the more distinctly he must see that
to devote himself to increase the scientific or philosophical wealth of
the English tongue will be to sacrifice comfort, the respect of the bulk
of his contemporaries, and all the most delightful things of life, for
the barren reward of a not very certain righteous self-applause. By
brewing and dealing in tied houses,[46] or by selling pork and tea, or
by stock-jobbing and by pandering with the profits so obtained to the
pleasures of the established great, a man of energy may hope to rise to
a pitch of public honour and popularity immeasurably in excess of
anything attainable through the most splendid intellectual performances.
Heaven forbid I should overrate public honours and the company of
princes! But it is not always delightful to be splashed by the wheels of
cabs. Always before there has been at least a convention that the Court
of this country, and its aristocracy, were radiant centres of moral and
intellectual influence, that they did to some extent check and correct
the judgments of the cab-rank and the beer-house. But the British Crown
of to-day, so far as it exists for science and literature at all, exists
mainly to repudiate the claims of intellectual performance to public
respect.

These things, if they were merely the grievances of the study, might
very well rest there. But they must be recognized here because the
intellectual decline of the published literature of the English
language--using the word to cover all sorts of books--involves finally
the decline of the language