and learning, are things to
break one's heart over.

It is not enough to think and to know. It requires the faculty of
utterance, and a peculiar kind of utterance. Certain things are to be
said in a certain manner; and your amateur article-writer is sure to say
them in any manner but the right. Perhaps of all styles of writing there
is none in which excellency is so rarely attained as that of
newspaper-writing. A readable leading article may not be a work of the
loftiest order, or demand for its execution the highest attributes of
genius; but, whatever it may be, the power of accomplishing it with
success is not shared by "thousands of clever fellows." Thousands of
clever fellows, fortified by Mr. Thackeray's opinion, may think that
they could write the articles which they read in the morning journals;
but let them take pen and paper and _try_.

We think it only fair that professional authors should have the credit
of being able to do what other people can not. They do not claim to
themselves a monoply of talent. They do not think themselves capable of
conducting a case in a court of law, as cleverly as a queen's counsel,
or of getting a sick man through the typhus fever as skillfully as a
practiced physician. But it is hard that they should not receive credit
for being able to write better articles than either the one or the
other; or, perhaps it is more to the purpose to say, than the briefless
lawyers and patientless medical students who are glad to earn a guinea
by their pens. Men are not born article-writers any more than they are
born doctors of law, or doctors of physic; as the ludicrous failures,
which are every day thrown into the rubbish-baskets of all our newspaper
offices, demonstrate past all contradiction. Incompetency is manifested
in a variety of ways, but an irrepressible tendency to fine writing is
associated with the greater number of them. Give a clever young medical
student a book about aural or dental surgery to review, and the chances
are ten to one that the criticism will be little else than a high-flown
grandiloquent treatise on the wonders of the creation. A regular
"literary hack" will do the thing much better.

If there be any set of men--we can not call it a _class_, for it is
drawn from all classes--who might be supposed to possess' a certain
capacity for periodical writing, it is the fraternity of members of
Parliament. They are in the habit of selecting given subjects for
consideration