Me, but leave no mark; the sun may shine, but cannot melt me. Argal, as
the clown says, is my verdict honest: and further now to prove it so,
shall come the limitations. With all my gratitude and right good feeling
to our diurnal and hebdomadal amusers and instructors, I cannot but
consider that gazette and newspaper reviewers are insufficient and
unsatisfactory judges of literature, if not indeed sometimes erring
guides to the public taste; the main cause of this consisting in the
essential rapidity of their composition. There is not--from the
multiplicity of business to be got through, there cannot be--adequate
time allowed for any thing like justice to the claims of each author.
Periodicals that appear at longer intervals are in all reason more or
less excepted from this objection; but by the daily and weekly majority,
the labours of a life-time are cursorily glanced at, hastily judged from
some isolated passage, summarily found laudable or guilty; and this weak
opinion, strongly enough expressed as some compensation in solid
superstructure for the sandiness of its foundations, is circulated by
thousands over all corners of the habitable world. To say that the
public (those so-called reviewers of reviews, but wiser to be looked on
only as perusers,) balance all such false verdicts, might indeed be true
in the long run, but unfortunately it is not: for first, no run at all,
far less a long one, is permitted to the persecuted production; and
next, it is notorious, that people think very much as they are told to
think. Now, I have alrea
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