1827.] On Reacting New Books. 23 



sition has been excited, and PascalPs Provincial Letters have been once 

 more enlisted into the service. In France you meet with no one who has 

 read the New Heloise : the Princess- of Cleves is not even mentioned in 

 these degenerate days. Is it not provoking with us to see the Beggar's 

 Opera cui down to two acts, because some of the allusions are too broad, 

 and others not understood ? And in America that Van Diemen's Land 

 of letters this sterling satire is hooted off the stage, because fortunately 

 they have no such state of manners as it describes before their eyes ; and 

 because, unfortunately, they have no conception of any thing but what 

 they see. America is singularly and awkwardly situated in this respect. It 

 is a new country with an old language ; and while every thing about them 

 is of a day's growth, they are constantly applying to us to know what to 

 think of it, and taking their opinions from our books and newspapers with 

 a strange mixture of servility and of the spirit of contradiction. They are 

 an independent state in politics : in literature they are still a colony from 

 us not out of their leading strings, and strangely puzzled how to determine 

 between the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews. We have naturalized 

 some of their writers, who had formed themselves upon us. This is at 

 once a compliment to them and to ourselves. Amidst the scramble and 

 lottery for fame in the present day, besides puffing, which may be regarded 

 as the hot-bed of reputation, another mode has been attempted by trans- 

 planting it ; and writers who are set down as drivellers at home, shoot up 

 great authors on the other side of the water ; pack up their all a title-page 

 and sufficient impudence ; and a work, of which the flocci-nauci-nihili- 

 pili-fication, in Shenstone's phrase, is well known to every competent 

 judge, is placarded into eminence, and " flames in the forehead of the 

 morning sky" on the walls of Paris or St. Petersburgh. I dare not mention 

 the instances, but so it is. Some reputations last only while the possessors 

 live, from which one might suppose that they gave themselves a character 

 for genius : others are cried up by their gossiping acquaintances, as long 

 as they give dinners, and make their houses places of polite resort ; 

 and, in general, in our time, a book may be considered to have passed the 

 ordeal that is mentioned at all three months after it is printed. Immorta- 

 lity is not even a dream a boy's conceit ; and posthumous fame is no more 

 regarded by the author than by his bookseller.* 



This idle, dissipated turn seems to be a set-off to, or the obvious reaction 

 of, the exclusive admiration of the ancients, which was formerly the 

 fashion : as if the sun of human intellect rose and set at Rome and Athens, 

 and the mind of man had never exerted itself to any purpose since. The 

 ignorant, as well as the adept, were charmed only with what was obsolete 

 and far-fetched, wrapped up in technical terms and in a learned tongue. 

 Those who spoke and wrote a language which hardly any one at present 

 even understood, must of course be wiser than we. Time, that brings so 

 many reputations to decay, had embalmed others and rendered them 

 sacred. From an implicit faith and overstrained homage paid to antiquity, 

 we of the modern school have taken too strong a bias to what is new ; and 

 divide all wisdom and worth between ourselves and posterity, not a very 

 formidable rival to our self-love, as we attribute all its advantages to our- 



* When a certain poet was asked if he thought Lord Byron's name would live three 

 years after he was dead, he answered. " Not three days, Sir!" This was premature: it 

 has lasted above a year. His works have been translated into French, and there is a Caff& 

 Byron on the Boulevards. Think of a " Caffe Wordsworth" on the Boulevards ! 



