3 JO Trade and Profession. [Ai'KtL, 



There is nothing in life more gauche, more impracticable, more helpless, 

 than a purely professional man, who imagines that high honour and deep 

 feeling are the proper adjuncts of a liberal pursuit, and who thinks that 

 whatever degrades the man detracts from the practitioner. His fate is 

 sealed his destiny is spun. Indignation, and contempt of successful 

 unworthiness, embitter the prime of his life ; hope deferred, sickens the 

 hours of his repining manhood ; and disappointment and despair close his 

 unuseful and unprofitable career. Too late he finds that he has sacrificed 

 his life to a chimera, and too late he discovers that he is laughed at for his 

 honesty. 



It is not, however, my purpose to be pathetic ; but simply to mark the 

 bounds between trade and profession, or rather to shew that such bounds 

 do not exist. Look, again, at literature ! is that a liberal art? or can a man 

 safely launch himself into the career, as a means of existence, without a 

 strong spice of charlatanerie ? In these days, the most profitable parts of 

 the best authors' writings are the paragraphs he indites for the newspapers, 

 to illustrate his " whereabouts," and to spread the note of his own notoriety. 

 To-day, he tells the world how he dined with princes ; to-morrow, he 

 communicates, under the modest disguise of an indifferent third person, 

 how much (he wishes the world to believe) the booksellers have paid for 

 his manuscript for our modern logic is, that large prices beget large sales, 

 and large sales make good books. Formerly, the stream of cause and 

 effect flowed in a different course ; but '* live and learn " is a good pro- 

 verb. Then, again, he "turns diseases to commodity," and converts bul- 

 letins into advertisements ; and he cannot take a place in a stage-coach 

 without the world's being made an accessary after the fact. I dwell not 

 upon the sordid, mercantile part of authorship the dealings with the 

 booksellers who, by dint of their business-like habits, make authors as 

 great Jews as themselves. But what can be more tradesman like than a 

 subscription-list? or the barter of time, patience, and independence for 

 the praise of a blue-stocking coterie? or the sacrifice of principles and 

 predilections to conciliate a review ? Yet all these things are, in a manner, 

 forced upon original writers of much merit and pretension. Far worse is 

 it with the paste-and -scissors gentry, who fabricate new octavos out of old 

 folios, and who make goods " as bespoke" for the literary market. These 

 men will do any subject from a treatise on astronomy to a " Pastry- 

 Cook's Companion." They are ready for metaphysics, or jest-books a 

 play, or a Methodist sermon. " Equal to both, and armed for either 

 field," they are as ready for an epic as for an epigram for three quarto 

 volumes of travels to the antipodes, as three pages of a voyage "par terre et 

 par mer" to Richmond. Nothing comes amiss to them ; and as romances give 

 place to novels, novels to tales, tales to travels, travels to " reminiscences," 

 and reminiscences to whatever may become the vogue, they follow in the 

 race of imitation ; and, always equally dull and equally obedient " to 

 orders," prove themselves at least te> have " the pen of a ready- writer." 

 But I am wrong in confining these practices to scrubs in literature. The 

 very best writers of the age do not altogether disdain this drudgery of 

 journey-work. The sons of poetry descend from the highest flights, to edit 

 a ponderous edition, or compose a quarto of biography, at the bidding of 

 some bibliopolio Prospero, and " do this spiriting gently," in whatever 

 clement, whether of " sea or fire, of earth or air/' his potent word directs ; 

 using " no power expect commanded to it." Nor is this the worst of it. 



