withal, I am a very indifferent hand at a rubber. I have never, like Bubb Doddington, expressed a determined ambition "to make a public figure-I had not decided what, but a public figure I was resolved to make." Nay, more, in a general view, I am not anxious to see literary men "giving up to a party what was meant for mankind," or hanging like sloths on the "branches of the revenue," or even engrossing working situations, such as gauger-ships, to the exclusion of humbler individuals, who, like Dogberry, have the natural gifts of reading and writing, and nothing else. Neither am I eager to claim for them those other distinctions, titles and decorations, the dignity of which requires a certain affluence of income for its support. A few orders indeed, domestic or foreign, conferred through a bookseller, hang not ungracefully on an author, at the same time that they help to support his slender revenue; but there would be something too ludicrous even for my humor, in a star-and no coat; a Garter-and no stocking; a coronet-and no nightcap; a collar-and no shirt! Besides, the creatures have, like the glowworm and the firefly (but at the head instead of the tail), a sort of splendor of their own, which makes them less in need of any adventitious lustre. If I have dwelt on the dearth of state patronage, public employments, honors and emoluments, it was principally to correct a Vulgar Error, not noticed by Sir Thomas Browne; namely, that poets and their kind are "marigolds in the sun's eye,❞—the world's favorite and pet children; whereas they are in reality its snubbed ones. It was to show that Literature, neglected by the government, and unprotected by the law, was placed in a false position; whereby its professors present such anomalous phenomena as high priests of knowledge-without a surplus; enlarged minds in the King's Bench; schoolmasters obliged to be abroad; great scholars without a knife and fork and spoon; master minds at journey work; moral magistrates greatly unpaid; immortals without a living; menders of the human heart breaking their own; mighty intellects begrudged their mite; great wits jumping into nothing good; ornaments to their country put on the shelf; constellations of genius under a cloud; eminent pens quite stumped up; great lights of the age with a thief in them; prophets to booksellers ;

my ink almost blushes from black to red whilst marking such associations of the divine ore with the earthly-but, methinks, 'tis the metal of one of the scales in which we are weighed and found wanting. Poverty is the badge of all our tribe, and its reproach. There is, for instance, a well-known taunt against a humble class of men, who live by their pens, which, girding not at the quality of their work, but the rate of its remuneration, twits them as penny-a-liners! Can the world be aware of the range of the shaft? What pray, was glorious John Milton, upon whom rested an after-glow of the holy inspiration of the sacred writers, like the twilight bequeathed by a mid-summer sun? Why he was, as you may reckon any time in his divine Paradise Lost, not even a ha'penny-a-liner! We have no proof that Shakspeare, the high priest of humanity, was even a farthing-aliner, and we know that Homer not only sold his lines "gratis for nothing," but gave credit to all eternity! If I wrong the world I beg pardon-but I really believe it invented the phrase of the republic of letters, to insinuate that taking the whole lot of authors together, they have not got a sovereign amongst them! I have now reduced Literature, as an arithmetician would say, to its lowest terms. I have shown her like Misery,—

For Misery is trodden on by many,
And, being low, never relieved by any,―

fairly ragged, beggar'd, and down in the dust, having been robbed of her last farthing by a pickpocket (that's a pirate). There she sits, like Diggon Davie "Her was her while it was daylight, but now her is a most wretched wight," or rather like a crazy Kate; a laughing-stock for the mob (that's the world), unprotected by the constable (that's the law), threatened by the beadle (that's the law too), repulsed from the workhouse by the overseer (that's the government), and denied any claim on the parish funds. Agricultural distress is a fool to it! One of those counterfeit cranks, to quote from "The English Rogue,” “such as pretend to have the falling sickness, and by putting a piece of white soap into the corner of their mouths will make the froth come boiling forth, to cause pity in the beholders."

If we inquire into the causes of this depression, some must un. doubtedly be laid at the doors of literary men themselves; but perhaps the greater proportion may be traced to the want of any definite ideas amongst people in general, on the following particulars:-1. How an author writes. 2. Why an author writes. 3. What an author writes. And firstly, as to how he writes, upon which head there is a wonderful diversity of opinions; one thinks that writing is "as easy as lying," and pictures the author sitting carefully at his desk "with his glove on," like Sir Roger de Coverley's poetical ancestor. A second holds that "the easiest reading is d-d hard writing," and imagines Time himself beating his brains over an extempore. A third believes in inspiration, i. e., that metaphors, quotations, classical allusions, historical illustrations, and even dramatic plots-all come to the waking author by intuition; whilst ready-made poems, like Coleridge's Kubla Khan, are dictated to him in his sleep. Of course the estimate of his desert will rise or fall according to the degree of learned labor attributed to the composition: he who sees in his mind's eye a genius of the lamp, consuming gallons on gallons of midnight oil-will assign a rate of reward, regulated probably by the success of the Hull whalers; whilst the believer in inspiration will doubtless conceive that the author ought to be fed as well as prompted by miracle, and accordingly bid him look up, like the apostle on the old Dutch tiles, for a bullock coming down from heaven in a bundle. 2dly. Why an author writes; and there is as wide a patchwork of opinions on this head as on the former. Some think that he writes for the present-others, that he writes for posterity-and a few, that he writes for antiquity. One believes that he writes for the benefit of the world in general-his own excepted-which is the opinion of the law. A second conceives that he writes for the benefit of booksellers in particular-and this is the trade's opinion. A third takes it for granted that he writes for nobody's benefit but his own-which is the opinion of the green-room. He is supposed to write for fame-for money-for amusement-for political ends-and, by certain schoolmasters, "to improve his mind." Need it be wondered at, that in this uncertainty as to his motives, the world sometimes perversely gives him anything but

the thing he wants. Thus the rich author, who yearns for fame, gets a pension; the poor one, who hungers for bread, receives a diploma from Aberdeen; the writer for amusement has the pleasure of a mohawking review in a periodical; and the gentleman in search of a place has an offer from a sentimental milliner! 3dly. What an author writes. The world is so much of a Champollion, that it can understand hieroglyphics, if nothing else; it can comprehend outward visible signs, and grapple with a tangible emblem. It knows that a man on a table stands for patriotism, a man in the pulpit for religion, and so on, but it is a little obtuse as to what it reads in King Cadmus's types. A book hangs out no sign. Thus persons will go through a chapter, enforcing some principal duty of man towards his Maker or his neighbor, without discovering that, in all but the name, they have been reading a sermon. A solid mahogany pulpit is wanting to such a perception. They will con over an essay, glowing with the most ardent love of liberty, instinct with the noblest patriotism, and replete with the soundest maxims of polity, without the remotest notion that, except its being delivered upon paper instead of vivâ voce, they have been attending to a speech. As for dreaming of the author as a being who could sit in Parliament, and uphold the same sentiments, they would as soon think of chairing an abstract idea. They must see a bona fide wagon, with its true blue orange or green flag, to arrive at such a conclusion. The material keeps the upperhand. Hence the sight of a substantial Vicar may suggest the necessity of a parsonage and a glebe; but the author is, according to the proverb, "out of sight, out of mind "—a spirituality not to be associated with such tangible temporalities as bread and cheese. He is condemned par contumace, to dine, tête-à-tête, with the Barmecide or Duke Humphrey, whilst, for want of a visible hustings, or velvet cushion, the small still voice of his pages is never conceived of as coming from a patriot, a statesman, a priest, or a prophet. As a case in point: there is a short poem by Southey, called the "Battle of Blenheim," which from the text of some poor fellow's skull who fell in the great victory

For many a thousand bodies there

Lay rotting in the sun

takes occasion to ask what they killed each other for? and what good came of it in the end? These few quaint verses contain the very essence of a primary Quaker doctrine; yet lacking the tangible sign—a drab coat or a broad-brimmed hat—no member of the sect ever yet discovered that, in all but the garb, the peace-loving author was a Friend, moved by the spirit, and holding forth in verse in a strain worthy of the great Fox himself! Is such poetry, then, a vanity, or something worthy of all quakerly patronage? Verily, if the copyright had been valued at a thousand pounds the Society ought to have purchased it— printed the poem as a tract—and distributed it by tens of thousands, yea, hundreds of thousands, till every fighting man in the army and navy had a copy, including the marines. The Society, however, has done nothing of the kind; and it has only acted like society in general towards literature, by regarding it as a vanity or a luxury rather than as a grand moral engine, capable of advancing the spiritual as well as the temporal interests of mankind. It has looked upon poets and their kind as common men, and not as spirits that, like the ascending and descending angels in Jacob's vision, hold commerce with the sky itself, and help to maintain the intercourse between earth and heaven. I have yet a few comments to offer on the charges usually preferred against literary men, but shall reserve them for another and concluding letter.

LETTER III.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE ATHENÆUM :

My dear Sir,-Now to the sins which have been laid at the doors, or tied to the knockers, of literary men: those offences which are to palliate or excuse such public slights and neglects as I have set forth; or may be, such private ones as selling a presentation copy, perhaps a dedicatory one, as a bookseller would sell the Keepsake, with the author's autograph letterswithout the delicacy of waiting for his death, or the policy; for,