of him; letting him out at just the right buying intervals;
always gently feeling his mouth; never slacking and never jerking the
rein;--this is what I mean by jockeying.

----When an author has a number of books out, a cunning hand will keep
them all spinning, as Signor Blitz does his dinner-plates; fetching
each one up, as it begins to "wabble," by an advertisement, a puff, or
a quotation.

----Whenever the extracts from a living writer begin to multiply fast in
the papers, without obvious reason, there is a new book or a new
edition coming. The extracts are _ground-bait_.

----Literary life is full of curious phenomena. I don't know that there
is anything more noticeable than what we may call _conventional
reputations_. There is a tacit understanding in every community of
men of letters that they will not disturb the popular fallacy
respecting this or that electro-gilded celebrity. There are various
reasons for this forbearance: one is old; one is rich; one is
good-natured; one is such a favorite with the pit that it would not be
safe to hiss him from the manager's box. The venerable augurs of the
literary or scientific temple may smile faintly when one of the tribe
is mentioned; but the farce is in general kept up as well as the
Chinese comic scene of entreating and imploring a man to stay with
you, with the implied compact between you that he shall by no means
think of doing it. A poor wretch he must be who would wantonly sit
down on one of these bandbox reputations. A Prince-Rupert's-drop,
which is a tear of unannealed glass, lasts indefinitely, if you keep
it from meddling hands; but break its tail off, and it explodes and
resolves itself into powder. These celebrities I speak of are the
Prince-Rupert's-drops of the learned and polite world. See how the
papers treat them! What an array of pleasant kaleidoscopic phrases,
that can be arranged in ever so many charming patterns, is at their
service! How kind the "Critical Notices"--where small authorship
comes to pick up chips of praise, fragrant, sugary, and sappy--always
are to them! Well, life would be nothing without paper-credit and
other fictions; so let them pass current. Don't steal their chips;
don't puncture their swimming-bladders; don't come down on their
pasteboard boxes; don't break the ends of their brittle and unstable
reputations, you fellows who all feel sure that your names will be
household words a thousand years from now.

"A thousand years