138 The Last Book. [Avé. 
the door to a comparative and superlative. Since, therefore, no cir- 
cumspection, no flexibility of terms can settle any thing as final but for 
the time being, I abstain from drawing out such phrases as the 
Last-of-all Book, or the Latest of the Last Books ; it being clear to the 
least logical comprehension, that the lapse of one day might produce a 
Later-than-that-Book. Accordingly, without putting syllables to the 
rack, I leave the Last Book to engender its bibliographical posterity, 
merely soliciting for it the patronage of that extensive part of the 
community, the Last People in the World, who will doubtless place it 
among the many last things at present so popular. Having now, it is 
hoped, in a truly modern spirit, excited the requisite portion of 
curiosity, I proceed to disappoint expectation with an alacrity not to be 
surpassed by the Northern Novelist himself. 
Whether the “ balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,” 
having been ordered to lie on the table of the Long Parliament, had been 
served up to me by the hand of the Protector, ‘it would be impolitic as 
well as ungrateful to determine. Quite certain it is that I had sauntered 
through some ninety-nine pages of the Last New Novel (though least 
not last!) when my eyes involuntarily and uncritically closed—only as 
I thought during the interval of turning over a page—and, on the 
‘instant, I found myself fifty fathoms deep in meditation upon the 
stupendous pyramid of paper and pasteboard that has been reared by 
the labours of a single pen. I thought upon the hours of fine phrenzy, 
the weeks of studious application—of the fever of spirit—the bubbling- 
up of the blood from the centre of sensation—the thirst of glory, and 
of bills payable at sight—that had been devoted to its erection. I 
then ventured a glance at the countless fingers that had been set in 
motion—the mouths and minds that had been fed and fascinated—the 
daughters that had got scolded, and the dinners that had got cold—the 
hearts set beating, and the curtains set fire to—through the agency of 
the same solitary goose-quill. On what a slight point, even on that of 
a feather, does the great world of literature perform its evolutions! 
These reflections oceled scarcely the sixtieth part of a second. The. 
number of quarts of blood that pass through the human heart in an 
hour has been frequently calculated; the number of thoughts that flash 
through the brain in one moment, never. I proceeded to enumerate 
severally, on my mind’s fingers, the eighty thousand greatest living 
authors, each “attended by the pleasures of the world,” and a well 
bound retinue of fifty folio volumes. The estimate overpowered me ; 
my senses were bewildered with black letter and marginal references. — 
Through a vista of writers, all with pens more or less pointed, and all 
plumed, I descried the prolifie hand of a Trismegistus himself— 
he who is said to have composed (hear it, ye little essayists of a column) 
‘thirty-six thousand, five hundred and twenty-five books: I instinctively 
groaned for the reading public of his day.—Libraries, ancient and 
modern, stagnant as well as circulating, officiously crowded on my 
attention, and spread before me their contents and catalogues, dark- 
ening the summer sun. I was sailing “alone on a wide, wide sea,” 
and every wave was a volume. The wide-leafed table before me 
* seemed like an open folio; the houses on the opposite side of the 
street wore a literary aspect; every brick appeared a book—every 
tenement a library, to which you ascended by a flight of volumes. 
The white clouds were piled on the blue shelves of heaven, like.a 
ib 
et 
d 
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