Robin
Gray,' just as Miss Elliott and Mrs. Cockburn are known only by their
respective 'Flowers of the Forest.' We remember Oldys merely by his
'Busy, curious, thirsty fly,' Sir William Jones by his 'What constitutes
a State?' Blanco White by his one Sonnet upon Night, Charles Wolfe by
his 'Burial of Sir John Moore,' John Collins by his 'In the Downhill of
Life,' and Herbert Knowles by his 'Lines in a Churchyard.' As Artemus
Ward said of the oil-painting achieved by the Old Masters: 'They did
this, and then they expired.' Some of them wrote other things, but the
world received them not. It took count only of the single occasion on
which they had been influenced by the divine _afflatus_--of the one
thing which they had done 'supremely' well.

Authors themselves are, no doubt, surprised at the caprices of the
public, and somewhat piqued by the preferences of their patrons. Some
are Single-Speech Hamiltons only because their readers have taken a
special fancy to particular performances--not always because the
achievements were obviously the best, but simply because circumstances
brought them to the fore. It is, one may assume, to the charm of Haydn's
musical setting that Mrs. Hunter owes the fame and popularity of 'My
mother bids me bind my hair': it is to the composer, in that case, that
the acceptance of the words are owing. Obvious causes, again, have given
precedence to Heber's 'From Greenland's icy mountains' over all his
other work in verse; just as the fact of having got into the extract
books has accorded to Blake's 'Tiger, tiger, burning bright' a
pre-eminence in the public mind over all his other efforts. In these
matters the world will have its own way. It still extends recognition to
Young's 'Night Thoughts,' but is apparently indifferent to his
'Universal Passion.' It thinks of Bloomfield only in connection with
'The Farmer's Boy,' and ignores the rest; just as it faintly recollects
'The Sabbath' of James Grahame, but has forgotten even the titles of
'Biblical Pictures' and 'The British Georgics.'

This dependence of literary fame upon special public favourites is,
perhaps, most strikingly represented in the field of fiction and the
drama. Nothing is more common than that a novelist or a dramatist
should remain in the popular memory by virtue of a single production.
Beckford is for most people only the author of 'Vathek'; it is only the
bibliophile who troubles himself about 'Azemia' or 'The Elegant
Enthusi