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I never yet knew a person with an especial reputation for candour without finding sooner or later that he had developed it as animals develop their organs, through "sense of need." Not only did Mr. Darwin remain perfectly quiet, but all reviewers and litterateurs remained perfectly quiet also.
The long-winded are the dullest of dull reviewers, but the most pernicious are the wielders of cliches and platitudes. Is there somewhere a reviewer's manual, like the manual of correct social phrases which some one has recently published? I would believe it from the evidence of a hundred reviews in which the same phrases, differently arranged, are applied to fifty different books.
Chorley, I hope it will not be transgressing very much against the etiquette of journalism, or against the individual delicacy which is of more consequence to both of us, if I venture to thank you by one word for the pages which relate to me in your excellent article in the 'New Quarterly. It is not my habit to thank or to remonstrate with my reviewers, and indeed I believe I may tell you that I never wrote to thank anyone before on these grounds.
Barrymore, etc., to the number of eleven, had all parts equally prominent, and there was as much of them in quantity and rank as of the hero and heroine, and most of them gentlemen who seldom appear but as the hero's friend in a farce, for a minute or two, and here they all had their ten-minute speeches, and one of them gave the audience a serious account how he was now a lawyer, but had been a poet; and then a long enumeration of the inconveniences of authorship, rascally booksellers, reviewers, etc.; which first set the audience a-gaping.
Solemn Bishops and high Dignitaries, our divine "Pillars of Fire by night," debating meanwhile, with their largest wigs and gravest look, upon something they call "prevenient grace"? Alas, our noble men of genius, Heaven's real messengers to us, they also rendered nearly futile by the wasteful time; preappointed they everywhere, and assiduously trained by all their pedagogues and monitors, to "rise in Parliament," to compose orations, write books, or in short speak words, for the approval of reviewers; instead of doing real kingly work to be approved of by the gods!
Neither let me, poor innocent, be accused of giving license to what a palled public and dyspeptical reviewers will call for the thousandth time a cacoethes; word of cabalistic look, unknown to Dr. Dilworth.
Ordinary reviewers do not seem to have perceived at all that a rare humorist, humanist and master of prose had arisen, although among the finer intellects who had any inclination to search for excellence for excellence's sake Lamb made his way.
The comparison of the literary situation at Boston to the literary situation at Edinburgh in the times of the reviewers has never seemed to me accurate or adequate, and it holds chiefly in the fact that both seem to be of the past. Certainly New York is yet no London in literature, and I think Boston was once vastly more than Edinburgh ever was, at least in quality.
This, however, I should say at once, is extremely unlikely. Habitual and confirmed readers, unless they happen to be reviewers, seldom read worthless books.
They were published in 1773 in a pamphlet of 16 pages, and, with the good fortune that attends a muse in the peerage, reached a third edition in the year. To this same earl the second edition of Byron's Hours of Idleness was 'dedicated by his obliged ward and affectionate kinsman, the author. In English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, he is abused in the passage which begins:
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