least (which is a kind of Tithonus-immortality) upon some respected
progenitor, or assure it to himself, with little trouble and at the cost
of a postage-stamp.

The benignity of Providence is nowhere more strongly marked than in its
compensations; and what can be more beautiful than the arrangement by
which the same harmless disinterestedness of matter and style that once
made an author the favorite of trunk-makers and grocers should, by
thus leading to the quiet absorption of his works, make them sure of
commemoration by Brunet or Lowndes and of commanding famine-prices under
the hammer? Fame, like electricity, is thus positive and negative; and
if a writer must be Somebody to make himself of permanent interest to
the world at large, he must not less be Nobody--like Junius--to have his
namelessness embalmed by Mons. Guérard. Take comfort, therefore, all ye
who either make paper invaluable or worthless by the addition of your
autograph! for your dice (as the Abbé Galiani said of Nature's) are
always loaded, and you may make your book the heir of Memory in two
ways,--by contriving to get the fire of genius into it, or to get it
into the fire by the hands of the hangman. Milton's "Areopagitica" is an
example of one method, and the "Philostratus" of Blount (who pillaged
the "Areopagitica") of the other. And yet, again, how perverse is human
nature! how more perverse is literary taste! There is a large class
of men madly desirous to read cuneiform and runic inscriptions simply
because of their unreadableness, adding to our compulsory stock of
knowledge about the royal Smiths and Joneses of to-day much conjectural
and conflicting information concerning their royal prototypes of an
antiquity unknown, and, as we fondly hoped, unknowable. Were there only
a compensatory arrangement for this also in another class who should be
driven by a like irresistible instinct to unreadable books, the heart
of the political economist would be gladdened at seeing the substantial