K.--SCOTT OF AMWELL.

We have witnessed the malignant influence of illiberal criticism, not
only on literary men, but over literature itself, since it is the
actual cause of suppressing works which lie neglected, though
completed by their authors. The arts of literary condemnation, as they
may be practised by men of wit and arrogance, are well known; and it
is much less difficult than it is criminal, to scare the modest man of
learning, and to rack the man of genius, in that bright vision of
authorship sometimes indulged in the calm of their studies--a generous
emotion to inspire a generous purpose! With suppressed indignation,
shrinking from the press, such have condemned themselves to a
Carthusian silence; but the public will gain as little by silent
authors as by a community of lazy monks; or a choir of singers who
insist they have lost their voice. That undue severity of criticism
which diminishes the number of good authors, is a greater calamity
than even that mawkish panegyric which may invite indifferent ones;
for the truth is, a bad book produces no great evil in literature; it
dies soon, and naturally; and the feeble birth only disappoints its
unlucky parent, with a score of idlers who are the dupes of their rage
after novelty. A bad book never sells unless it be addressed to the
passions, and, in that case, the severest criticism will never impede
its circulation; malignity and curiosity being passions so much
stronger and less delicate than taste or truth.

And who are the authors marked out for attack? Scarcely one of the
populace of scribblers; for wit will not lose one silver shaft on game
which, struck, no one would take up. It must level at the Historian,
whose novel researches throw a light in the depths of antiquity; at
the Poet, who, addressing himself to the imagination, perishes if that
sole avenue to the heart be closed on him. Such are those who receive
the criticism which has sent some nervous authors to their graves, and
embittered the life of many whose talents we all regard.[99]

But this species of criticism, though ungenial and nipping at first,
does not always kill the tree which it has frozen over.

In the calamity before us, Time, that great autocrat, who in its
tremendous march destroys authors, also annihilates critics; and
acting in this instance with a new kind of benevolence, takes up some
who have been violently thrown down, and fixes them in their proper
place; and daily enfe