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By Root 16576 0

who glean it from the paragraphs of the papers, and the same reputation as deduced from the private estimate of intelligent and educated men. We do not advance this fact as a new discovery. Its truth, on the contrary, is the subject, and has been long so, of every-day witticism and mirth. Why not? Surely there can be few things more ridiculous than the general character and assumptions of the ordinary "critical notices" of new books! An editor, possibly without the shadow of the commonest attainments, often without brains, always without time, scruples not to give the world to understand that he is in the daily habit of critically reading and deciding upon a flood of publications, three-fourths of which would be Hebrew to his most desperate efforts at comprehension, one-tenth of whose title-pages he may probably have turned over, and whose whole mass and amount, as might be mathematically demonstrated, would be sufficient to occupy, in the most cursory perusal, the laborious attention of some ten or twenty men for a month! What he wants in plausibility, however, he makes up in obsequiousness — what in time, in temper. He is the most easily pleased man in the world. He admires every thing from the big Dictionary of Noah Webster, to the last little edition of Tom Thumb. Indeed his chief difficulty is to find tongue to express his delight. Every pamphlet is a miracle; every book in boards is an epoch in letters. His words, therefore, get bigger and bigger every day. If it were not for talking Cockney, we might call him "a regular swell." But what is to become of him in the end? He will either go up like a balloon, or be mistaken for a pair of bellows, on account of the sonorous pertinacity of his puffs.

Should opinions thus promulgated be taken, in their wonderful aggregate, as an evidence of what American literature absolutely is, (and it may be said that, in general, they are really so taken,) we shall find ourselves the most enviable set of people upon the face of the earth. Our fine writers are legion. Our very atmosphere is redolent of genius; and we, the nation, are a huge well-contented chameleon, having grown pursy by inhaling it. We are teres et rotundus — enwrapped in excellence. All our poets are Miltons, neither mute nor inglorious; all our poetesses are "American Hemanses;" nor will it do to deny that all our novelists are either great Knowns or great Unknowns, and that every body who writes in every possible and impossible department, is the admirable Crichton, or the ghost of the admirable Crichton, or at least the admirable Crichton redivivus. We are thus in a glorious condition; and will remain so until forced to disgorge our ethereal honors. In truth, there is some danger that the jealousy of the old World will interfere. It cannot long submit to that outrageous monopoly of "all decency and all the talent" in which the gentlemen of the press give such undoubted assurance of our being so busily engaged.

But we feel angry with ourselves for the jesting tone of our observations upon this topic. The prevalence of the spirit of puffery is a subject far less for merriment than for disgust. Its truckling, yet dogmatical character — its bold, unsustained, yet self-sufficient and wholesale laudation — is becoming, more and more, an insult to the common sense of the community. Trivial as it essentially is, it has yet been made the instrument of the grossest abuse in the elevation of imbecility, to the manifest injury to the utter ruin, of true merit. It there any man of good feeling and of ordinary understanding — is there one single individual among our readers — who does not feel a thrill of bitter indignation, altogether apart from any sentiment of mirth, as he calls to mind instance after instance of the purest, of the most [[un]]adulterated quackery in letters, which as arisen to a high post in the apparent popular estimation, and which still maintains it, by the sole means of a blustering arrogance, or of a busy wriggling conceit, or even through the simple immensity of its assumptions — assumptions not only