eople in London became afraid of looking into their works, lest they
too should be convicted of cockneyism. Oh brave public! This epithet
proved too much for one of the writers in question, and stuck like a
barbed arrow in his heart. Poor Keats! What was sport to the town was
death to him. Young, sensitive, delicate, he was like

"A bud bit by an envious worm,
Ere he could spread his sweet leaves to the air,
Or dedicate his beauty to the sun"--

and unable to endure the miscreant cry and idiot laugh, withdrew to
sigh his last breath in foreign climes.--The public is as envious and
ungrateful as it is ignorant, stupid, and pigeon-livered--

"A huge-sized monster of ingratitudes."

It reads, it admires, it extols only because it is the fashion, not
from any love of the subject or the man. It cries you up or runs you
down out of mere caprice and levity. If you have pleased it, it is
jealous of its own involuntary acknowledgment of merit, and seizes the
first opportunity, the first shabby pretext, to pick a quarrel with
you, and be quits once more. Every petty caviller is erected into a
judge, every tale-bearer is implicitly believed. Every little low
paltry creature that gaped and wondered only because others did so, is
glad to find you (as he thinks) on a level with himself. An author is
not then, after all, a being of another order. Public admiration is
forced, and goes against the grain. Public obloquy is cordial and
sincere: every individual feels his own importance in it. They give
you up bound hand and foot into the power of your accusers. To attempt
to defend yourself is a high crime and misdemeanour, a contempt of
court, an extreme piece of impertinence. Or, if you prove every charge
unfounded, they never think of retracting their error, or making you
amends. It would be a compromise of their dignity; they consider
themselves as the party injured, and resent your innocence as an
imputation on their judgment. The celebrated Bub Doddington, when out
of favour at court, said "he would not _justify_ before his sovereign:
it was for Majesty to be displeased, and for him to believe himself in
the wrong!" The public are not quite so modest. People already begin
to talk of the Scotch Novels as overrated. How then can common authors
be supposed to keep their heads long above water? As a general rule,
all those who live by the public starve, and are made a bye-word and a
standing jest into the bargain. Po