rge of forty, and can sympathize with
Jephtha's daughter in her lonely mournings, causelessly begin to fear
that a mischievous author may appropriate their portraits; venerable
bachelors, who have striven to earn some little local notoriety by the
diligent use of an odd phrase, a quaint garment, or an eccentric fling
in the peripatetic, dread a satirist's powers of retributive burlesque;
table orators suddenly grow dumb, for they suspect such a caitiff
intends cold-blooded plagiarisms from their eloquence; the twinkling
stars of humble village spheres shun him for an ominous comet, whose
very trail robs them of light, or as paling glow-worms hide away before
some prying lantern; and all who have in one way or another prided
themselves on some harmless peculiarity, avoid his penetrating glance as
the eye of a basilisk. Then, again, those casual encounters of witlings
in the world authorial, so anticipated by a hostess, so
looked-forward-to by guests! In most cases, how forlorn they be! how
dull; constrained, suspicious! like rival traders, with pockets
instinctively buttoned up, and glaring each upon the other with most
uncommunicative aspects; not brothers at a banquet, but combatants and
wrestlers, watching for solecisms in the other's talk, or toiling to
drag in some laboured witticism of their own, after the classical
precedent of Hercules and Cerberus: those feasts of reason, how vapid!
those flows of soul, how icily congealing! those Attic nights, how dim
and dismal! Once more; and, remember me, I speak in a personated
character of the general, and not experimentally; so, flinging self
aside, let me speak what I have seen: grant that the world-without crown
a man with bays, and lead him to his Theban home with tokens of
rejoicing; is the victor there set on high, chapleted, and honoured as
Nemean heroes should be or does he not rather droop instantly again into
the obscure unit among a level mass, only the less welcome for having
stood up, a Saul or a Musaeus, with his head above his fellows? Verily,
no man is a proph--Enough, enough! for ours is a prerogative, a glorious
calling, and the crown of barren leaves is costlier than his of Rabbah;
enough, enough! sing we the praises, count we well the pleasures of
fervent, overflowing authorship. There, in perfect shape before the
eyes--there, well born in beauty--there perpetually (so your fondness
hopes) to live--slumbers in her best white robe the mind's own fairest
d