aken more than a
faintly reflected admiration. He who said, 'Give me to write the songs
of a people, and I care not who makes their laws,' touched the tender
spot in the great heart of humanity; he was a sage in that truest of
philosophy, the study of human nature. Though we have our princes in
every branch of literature, who are the result of and an honor to our
civilization, yet for their own results in moulding the tastes, the
habits, and the intellects of the common people, in contributing to
their advancement, they fall far below the efforts of the veriest
penny-a-liner. It is a lamentable fact of our society that while the
more solid literature scarcely pays, the flashiest of so-called 'flash
literature' brings down the golden shower. The writer of the lowest
possible order of literary productions is enriched, and his name is
familiar in the remotest corners of the land, while our monarchs of
literature are oftentimes poverty stricken and comparatively obscure;
and that because the latter is confined to a comparatively small
audience and patronage, while the former speaks to and for the masses;
and, as a natural consequence, the former controls the tastes of the
greater portion of the reading community, and that too for anything but
good, since he reaps his golden harvest by pandering to the basest of
appetites, the lowest of sensibilities and sympathies; thus retarding
rather than accelerating the intellectual advancement of the people,
this being his material interest.

And how great is the responsibility of those who thus speak to the ear
of the simple and the unlearned! how terrible the retribution they are
heaping up for themselves in the great hereafter, for thus prostituting
talent which might be made eminently useful in leading the minds of the
common people to the highest and noblest of truths; in making purer and
better in every sense of the word! The idea that the province of
literature, even of fiction, is simply to amuse, is exploded in the
light of advancing civilization. Every writer has a higher mission, and
accordingly as he discharges the duty which his faculty lays upon him,
is he true or false to the true end of his existence, a success or a
failure in the world of intellect and morality. The mission of all
literature is to make mankind both wiser and _better_, and the writer
who fails to appreciate and act upon this truth is worse than a useless
cumberer of society; he is a curse to his age, a