can think of, be it
Bunyan or Heine, Schopenhauer or Izaak Walton. One has but to cast
one's eyes over one's shelves to realize, as we see the familiar
names, how literally the books that bear them are living men, merely
transmigrated from their fleshly forms into the printed word.
Shakespeare and Milton, yes, even Pope; Johnson, Fielding, Sterne,
Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Carlyle, Dumas, Balzac, Emerson, Thoreau,
Hawthorne, Poe--their very faces seem to look out at us from the
bindings, such vividly human beings were they, with a vision of the
world, or a definition of character, so much their own and no one
else's. One might almost call them patented human beings--patentees of
spiritual discoveries, or of aspects of humanity, whose patents can
never be infringed for all our cleverness.

Said Tennyson, in bitter answer to criticism that began to depreciate
him because of the glibness of his imitators:

All can grow the flower now,
For all have got the seed.

And certainly, as I have already said, the art of literary impersonation
is carried to a pitch today that almost amounts to genius. Yet you have
only to compare the real flower with the imitation, and you will soon
understand the difference.

Take Walter Scott. It is a commonplace to say how much better we do the
historical novel nowadays than he did. At first sight, we may seem to;
in certain particulars, no doubt we do; but read him again, read _Rob
Roy_ or _Quentin Durward_ again, and you will not be quite so sure. You
will realize what an immortal difference there is, after all, between
the pen with a man behind it, and the most brilliant literary machine.

Yes, "the mob of gentlemen that write with ease" is once more with us,
but no real book was ever yet written with ease, and no book has ever
survived, or ever can, in which we do not feel the presence of the
fighting, dreaming, or merely enjoying soul of a man.

XXVIII

BULLS IN CHINA-SHOPS

There are some people of great value and importance in their own
spheres, who, on the strength of the distinction gained there, are apt
to intrude on other spheres of which they have no knowledge, where in
fact they are irrelevant, and often indeed ridiculously out of place.
This, however, does not prevent their trying to assert an authority
gained in their own sphere in those other spheres where they simply do
not belong; and such is the power of a name that is won for any one
th