1832.] [ 161 ] 



A MODEST DEFENCE OF LITERARY PUFFING. 



" Puffing is of various sorts. The principal are the puff' direct, the puff preliminary, the puff 

 collateral, the puff collusive, and the puff oblique, or puff by implication." 



THE CRITIC. 



" ET tu brnte !" What ! a truculent and despiteous attack upon the 

 pleasant and profitable practice of literary puffing from the reviewers ! 

 Nay, this would " raise a soul under the ribs of death ;" and I must posi- 

 tively run a tilt with my grey goose-quill against these dirt-throwing 

 Zoili, giving no quarter, not even to the Quarterly, until I make them 

 confess that they are themselves the authors of the very evil they depre- 

 cate, and infinitely more culpable, both as to fact and motive, than the 

 parties they presume to arraign. They really remind one of the fuli- 

 ginous kitchen utensil, in^he proverb, reproaching a more cleanly one 

 with its blackness ; or of the goose finding fault with the gosling 

 *' Why do you go nodding and waggling, so like a fool, as if you were hip- 

 shot foundered ?" Gentlemen Reviewers ! (excuse this term ; it proceeds 

 from my recent perusal of the " extinct titles") Gentlemen Reviewers! 

 you are like Othello,< not because of your black looks, or of your stifling 

 the innocent in their own sheets, but because your occupation's gone. 

 The field-day of the Reviews is over ; they are giving way to Maga- 

 zines ; they are gasping for the breath of life ; their final extinction is 

 rapidly approaching. Of the minors, several have already yielded up 

 the ghost ; some, volunteering the punishment inflicted by Mezentius, 

 have protracted their sufferings by incorporating themselves with a 

 defunct brother ; others have struggled to escape extinction by chang- 

 ing their titles, or periods of publication ; all are rapidly diminishing in 

 influence and circulation ; and if two or three still command a sale of 

 any magnitude, it is precisely because they are no longer reviews, but 

 party pamphlets, criticising authors, not books appealing to the passions 

 and prejudices of a particular class, instead of addressing themselves to 

 the lovers of general literature : and who are the writers selected 

 for this honourable office? One or two men of eminence are ad- 

 mitted, that their names may give a sort of sanction to the work ; and 

 these individuals may perhaps have virtue and independence enough to 

 spurn the shackles to which their coadjutors must submit; but the mass 

 are notoriously mercenaries, who, with the natural irritation of their 

 tribe, are embittered against the possessors of talent in exact proportion 

 to their want of it. " Let those teach others who themselves excel," 

 was the maxim of former times ; but in the march of no-intellect we 

 have reversed all this ; the convicted dunce wields the magisterial rod, 

 the ass sits in the professor's chair, and both are naturally severe, be- 

 cause the Boetians have found, by degrading experience, that it is much 

 more easy and pleasant not to like, than to do the like Hi prce cceteris 

 alios liber'vus carpere solent, qui nil proprium ediderunt : those men will 

 be most disposed to depreciate others >vho have done nothing themselves. 

 But the Latin quotation does not accurately describe the Zoili in ques- 

 tion. Generally speaking, they are not men who have written nothing, 

 but who, having signally and miserably failed in their own literary 

 attempts, take their revenge by attempting to run down and destroy 

 those who are likely to succeed, more especially in the departments 



M.M. New Series. Vol.. XIII. No. 74. M 



