of which, were all known, he has
more of the real merit than the author, who seems to have naturally,
without any external aid, taken his position among the eminent and
fortunate.

There are, at the same time, special disquisitions on matters of science
or learning intended for peculiar and limited audiences, which find
their way to publicity without the aid of the publisher. For these there
is an opening in certain institutions far older than the book clubs, and
possessed of a far higher social and intellectual position, since they
have the means of conferring titles of dignity on those they adopt into
their circle--titles which are worn not by trinkets dangling at the
button-hole, but by certain cabalistic letters strung to the name in the
directory of the town where the owner lives, or in the numberless
biographical dictionaries which are to immortalise the present
generation. So the author of an essay, especially in scholarship or
science, will, if it be worth anything, find a place for it in the
Transactions of one or other of the learned societies. It will probably
keep company with, if indeed it be not itself one of, a series of papers
which appear in the quarto volumes of the learned corporation's
Transactions, merely because they cannot get into the octavo pages of
the higher class of periodicals; but there they are, printed in the face
of the world, whose inhabitants at large may worship them if they so
please, and their authors cannot complain that they are suppressed.
Whether the authors of these papers may have been ambitious of their
appearance in a wider sphere, or are content with their appearance in
"The Transactions," it suffices for the present purpose to explain how
these volumes are a more suitable receptacle than those printed by the
book clubs for essays or disquisitions by men following up their own
specialties in literature or science; and if it be the case that some of
the essays which appear in the Transactions of learned bodies would
have gladly entered society under the auspices of some eminent
periodical, yet it is proper at the same time to admit that many of the
most valuable of these papers, concerning discoveries or inventions
which adepts alone can appreciate, could only be satisfactorily
published as they have been. And so we find our way back to the
proposition, that the book clubs have been judiciously restricted to the
promulgation of the works of dead authors.

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