er sorts of men. How to regulate that struggle? There is
the whole question. To leave it as it is, at the mercy of blind Chance;
a whirl of distracted atoms, one cancelling the other; one of the
thousand arriving saved, nine hundred and ninety-nine lost by the way;
your royal Johnson languishing inactive in garrets, or harnessed to the
yoke of Printer Cave; your Burns dying broken-hearted as a Gauger; your
Rousseau driven into mad exasperation, kindling French Revolutions
by his paradoxes: this, as we said, is clearly enough the _worst_
regulation. The _best_, alas, is far from us!

And yet there can be no doubt but it is coming; advancing on us, as yet
hidden in the bosom of centuries: this is a prophecy one can risk.
For so soon as men get to discern the importance of a thing, they do
infallibly set about arranging it, facilitating, forwarding it; and rest
not till, in some approximate degree, they have accomplished that. I
say, of all Priesthoods, Aristocracies, Governing Classes at present
extant in the world, there is no class comparable for importance to that
Priesthood of the Writers of Books. This is a fact which he who runs may
read,--and draw inferences from. "Literature will take care of itself,"
answered Mr. Pitt, when applied to for some help for Burns. "Yes," adds
Mr. Southey, "it will take care of itself; _and of you too_, if you do
not look to it!"

The result to individual Men of Letters is not the momentous one; they
are but individuals, an infinitesimal fraction of the great body; they
can struggle on, and live or else die, as they have been wont. But it
deeply concerns the whole society, whether it will set its _light_ on
high places, to walk thereby; or trample it under foot, and scatter it
in all ways of wild waste (not without conflagration), as heretofore!
Light is the one thing wanted for the world. Put wisdom in the head of
the world, the world will fight its battle victoriously, and be the best
world man can make it. I called this anomaly of a disorganic Literary
Class the heart of all other anomalies, at once product and parent; some
good arrangement for that would be as the _punctum saliens_ of a
new vitality and just arrangement for all. Already, in some European
countries, in France, in Prussia, one traces some beginnings of an
arrangement for the Literary Class; indicating the gradual possibility
of such. I believe that it is possible; that it will have to be
possible.

By far the most