An Authors Mind | Page 8

of your poor devils compulsory from poverty--Plutus
help them!--whose penury of pocket is (pardon me) too often equitably
balanced by their emptiness of head; and far less one of the lady's-maid
school, who will glory in describing a dish of cutlets at Calais, or an
ill-trimmed bonnet, or the contents of an old maid's reticule, or of a
young gentleman's portmanteau, or those rare occasions for
sentimentality, moonlight, twilight, arbours, and cascades, in the
moderate space of an hour by Shrewsbury clock: but a man who has it
weightily upon his mind to explain himself and others, to insist, refute,
enjoin: a man--frown not, fair helpmates; the controversial pen, as the
controversial sword, be ours; we will leave your flower-beds and
sweeter human nurseries, despotism over cooks and Penelobean
penance upon carpet-work; nay, a trip to Margate prettily described,
easy lessons and gentle hymns in behalf of those dear prattlers, and for
the more coerulean sort, "lyrics to the Lost one," or stanzas on a sickly
geranium, miserably perishing in the mephitic atmosphere of
routs--these we masculine tyrants, we Dionysii of literature,
ill-naturedly have accounted your prerogatives of authorship. But who
then are Sévigné and Somerville, Edgeworth and De Staël, Barbauld
and Benger, and Aikin, and Jameson, Hemans, Landon, and a thousand
more, not less learned, less accomplished, nor less useful? Forgive,

great names, my half-repeated slander: riding with the self-conceited
cortège of male critics, my boasted loyalty was well-nigh guilty of lèze
majesté: but I repudiate the thought; my verdict shall have no reproach
in it, as my championship no fear: how much has man to learn from
woman! teach us still to look on humanity in love, on nature in
thankfulness, on death without fear, on heaven without presumption;
fairest, forgive those foolish and ungallant calumnies of my ruder sex,
who boast themselves your teachers--making yet this wise use of the
slander: never be so bold in authorship, as to hazard the loss of your
sweet, retiring, modest, amiable, natural dependence: never stand out as
champions on the arena of strife, but if you will, strew it with posies for
the king of the tournament; it ill becomes you to be wrestlers, though a
Lycurgus allowed it, and Atalanta, another Eve, was tripped up by an
apple in the foot-race. So digressing, return we to our author; to wit, a
man, homo--a human, as they say in the west--with news of actual
value to communicate, and powers of pen competent to do so
graphically, honestly, kindly, boldly.
Much as we may emulate Homer's wordy braggadocios in boasting
ourselves far better than our fathers, still, great was the wisdom of our
ancestors: and that time-tried wisdom has given us three things that
make a man; he must build a house, have a child, write a book: and of
this triad of needfuls, who perceives not the superior and innate majesty
of the last requisite?--"Build a house?" I humbly conceive, and steal my
notion from the same ancestral source, that, in nine cases out of ten,
fools build houses for wise men to live in; besides, if houses be made a
test of supreme manhood, your modern wholesale runner-up of lath and
plaster tenements, warranted to stand seven years--provided quadrilles
be excluded, and no larger flock of guests than six be permitted to settle
on one spot--such a jackal for surgeons, such a reprobate provider for
accident-wards as this, would be among our heroes, a prize-man, the
flower of the species. "Children" too?--very happy, beautiful,
heart-gladdening creations--God bless them all, and scatter those who
love them not!--but still for a proof of more than average humanity,
somewhat common, somewhat overwhelming: rabbits beat us here,
with all our fecundity, so offensive to Martineau and Malthus. But as to
"books"--common enough, too, smirks gentle reader: pardon, courteous

sir, most rare--at least in my sense; I speak not of flat current shillings,
but the bold medallions of ancient Syracuse; I heed not the dull
thousands of minted gold and silver, but the choice coin-sculptures of
Larissa and Tarentum. There do indeed flow hourly, from an
ever-welling press, rivers of words; there are indeed shoaling us up on
all sides a throng of well-bound volumes--novels, histories, poems,
plays, memoirs, and so forth--to all appearance, books: but if by
"books" be intended originality of matter, independent arguments,
water turned wine, by the miracle of right-thinking, and not a mere
re-decantering of dregs from other vessels--these many masqueraded
forms, these multiplied images of little-varied likenesses, these Protean
herds, will not stay to be counted, nor abide judgment, nor brook
scrutiny, but will merge and melt by thousands into the one, or the two,
real, original, sterling books. We live in a monopolylogue of authorship:
an idea goes forth to the world's market-place well dressed from the
wardrobe of