t still a pleasant, murmuring, meandering, earnest little
dream-book, fresh with the solemn purpose of solitude and silence. No,
it must be confessed our authors and men of letters would make sad work
of it, if they had the bestowal of the honours and pecuniary rewards of
literature in their hands, whether these were administered by an
intellectual hierarchy or by a collective democracy. Hence the clubs
have wisely confined their operations to books which are not the works
of their members; and to keep clear of all risk of literary rivalries,
they have been almost exclusively devoted to the promulgation of the
works of authors long since dead, whether by printing from original
manuscripts or from rare printed volumes.

It has been pleaded that this machinery might have been rendered
influential for the encouragement of living authorship. It has been,
for instance, observed, with some plausibility, that he who has the
divine fervour of the author in him, will sacrifice all he has to
sacrifice--time, toil, and health--so that he can but secure a hearing
by the world; and institutions of the nature of the book clubs might
afford him this at all events, leaving him to find his way to wealth and
honours, if the sources of these are in him. No doubt the history of
book-publishing shows how small are the immediate inducements and the
well-founded hopes that will set authors in motion, and, indeed, a very
large percentage of valueless literature proves that the barriers
between the author and the world are not very formidable, or become
somehow easily removable. This, in fact, furnishes the answer to the
pleading here alluded to; and it may further be safely said, where the
book demanding an introduction professes to be a work of genius,
addressing itself to all mankind, that if it really be what it
professes, the market will get it. No production of the kind is liable
to be lost to the world.

Here it is plaintively argued by Philemon, that the rewards of genius
are very unequally distributed. Who can deny it? Nothing is distributed
with perfect balance like chemical equivalents in this world, at least
so far as mortal faculties are capable of estimating the elements of
happiness and unhappiness in the lot of our fellow-men; nor can one
imagine that a world, all balanced and squared off to perfection, would
be a very tolerable place to live in. Genius must take its chance, like
all other qualities, and, on the whole, in a civ