must any man continue to write? Is there not enough written already? What more remains to be said? Of the writing of books there is no end; but there ought to be. Our scientific explorers, of course, have always got something new to tell us, and must go on scribbling till they have rifled nature of her most subtle and cherished secrets; but surely Homer, and Horace, and Shakspeare, and Jeremy Taylor, and John Milton, and Rabelais, and Montaigne, and Goethe, and Martin Farquhar Tupper, are sufficient for all the generations of men that have yet to perish like the leaves? The ancients have taken an unfair advantage of their accidental priority, and have left no topic for a literary age to write about. They ought to have manifested a little consideration for posterity; more especially when they themselves turned their talent to so poor an account. Why did Milton take the pains to put together Paradise Lost if he only got ten or twelve shillings the canto for it? Had he left it to one of us we might have made as much out of each line. Even the Paradise Regained would enable a modern poet to live in ease, if not in affluence, during all the days of his life. Shakspeare was a thought more prudent, and worked a comfortable little farm in Warwickshire out of Lear and Macbeth. But with his comedies alone we could buy a county. Mr. Parker would settle a life annuity upon us, and Lord Palmerston or The Lyon King-atArms would put us into the peerage. We hear of the lavish fertility of Shakspeare's genius; but, in view of the duty which he owed to those who came after him, it seems to us, we confess, sheer recklessness and prodigality. The spendthrift has gambled away the family property. He has left his sons and daughters in beggary. They are forced to earn a shameful livelihood in Grub-street, while the

ancestral acres. Had he been a trifle more thrifty, had he bartered the barren bents, and thinned a few of the outlying plantations, there would still have remained a very comfortable reversion for his posterity. Hamlet and Othello alone, in half-guinea volumes, would have kept us above actual want.

So the question recurs-why do books continue to be written? The public can get whatsoever it wishes-jest and earnest, malice and mirth, pathos and bathos, art and life-in books that are already written, and of which the copyright has expired. There is nothing new under the sun, and the Atlantic cable is only another face of the many-headed god who, ere Homer sang the wrath of Achilles, preserved the planets in the heavenly places. Old books are like old wine, they are none the worse for the keeping. Each gathers from the destroying years a delicate bouquet and an aromatic virtue which, when moist from the printing-press or the wine-press, neither has. Remove the dust, brush the cobwebs away tenderly, and gently draw the grape-stained cork-how the golden vintagestream paints the carved silver of Cellini, and freights the fragrant air! Age is to them a crown of glory, and to them alone; for the smooth cheek of girlhood has ever been pleasanter, we own, to our unchastened hearts than the hoary hairs of wisdom. And there is one obvious particular in which_old books outvie old wine; they don't get so confoundedly dear. A man with a moderate income does not probably finish a single dozen of claret of '22 during his ignoble career. To drink of the ashes of dead relations, is said by Sir Thomas Browne to be a passionate prodigality;' but a bottle of Johannisburg is even more costly. The hundred-yeared Opimian, rich with rosy memories of the victories and triumphs of conscript fathers, who have returned, one

by one, to the dust, since it was first interred in its cellar, could only have been quaffed by emperors and proconsuls. But books become cheaper as they become old. The Iliad and the Odyssey will cost you less than the last poem of Mr. Martin Tupper.

However we may turn it, the problem we suspect must remain insoluble. It may no doubt be plausibly urged that new books continue to be read, and therefore to be written (for if they were not read, the habit of writing proving unremunerative would gradually die out), because the books that have been written impress the public with the conviction that others may be written. Shakspeare evoked Hamlet, and therefore society believes in the possibility of other Hamlets. Not knowing that the whole stock of mortal motive and terrestrial experience has been long since used up, it reads on in the pleasant expectation of finding something new. And the mercy to us poor scribblers is, that its acquaintance with antiquity not extending much behind the Reform Bill, it is not unfrequently gratified. Many very estimable people are at this moment perfectly ignorant that our entire existing literature is a gigantic plagiarism. Even a wellinformed paper like the Athenæum affects to believe that Mr. Smith's pilfering is a personal peculiarity. The jest is neat and artistic; though if the public should find it out, it might elicit unpleasant symptoms of irritation from the much-enduring animal. In truth the line is a dangerous one for the craft. There are some people who do not write hooks and reviews, who are yet neither blind nor deaf, and if they are once put on the scent, there is no saying where they may stop. And if the imposture should be exposed, is it not possible that the public may deem it wiser, as it is plainly cheaper, to go at once to the fountain head, and bathe in the pure well of English undefiled; to read Spenser, and Milton, and Butler, and Shakspeare, and Fielding, and

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Sterne, instead of Matthew Arnold, and Bulwer Lytton, and Lord Macaulay? To speak the truth, though we love The Caxtons, we prefer Tristram Shandy; and if we did not happen to be pecuniarily interested in the success of the deception, we should honestly recommend the original. We have always said, and continue to say, that Mr. Disraeli has not received justice at the hands of his adopted countrymen. Indeed, the most memorable incident in his career, as it appears to us, has been more bitterly criticised than any other. No one except a man of supreme audacity and perennial recklessness, would have ventured to place upon the grave of our great captain the faded immortelles of a French historian, who in his turn of course cribbed them from some earlier speaker or writer. In an age which to his impartial and historic mind must appear characteristically the age of plagiarism, he has won for himself, by a single daring stroke, an unrivalled preeminence the title of the boldest, most consummate, and inventive of plagiarists. It was a great movea splendid success. He might have pilfered, pilfered, as he knew very well, whole chapters from our standard classics, without any hope of detection. To ensure success he kid-. napped a living author.

But these pleasant practical jokes cannot be indulged with impunity, and if the public should take the hint it behoves us to look to our occupation. There will be another Western Bank crash. Our wretched pittance will be snatched from us. A man of the world, however, is never brought to a dead stop; and we flatter ourselves that we are equal to the crisis. Whenever the panic approaches, whenever men begin to look grave and suspicious, to send the new books back uncut to the publishers and to buy old ones in their place, then we mean to become-original. Nor is the function so difficult as at first sight it seems, nor as its entire disappearance from our literature might lead us to believe. The most genial and delightful of modern

philosophers has given us a new theory of knowing and being,' of which to the uninitiated the distinctive principle seems to be that what is, is not, and that which is not, is. To start an original school of letters we have only to apply this principle to the topics to which literature is chiefly devoted. Why cannot we be original? Because we are content to repeat the assertions and to accept the opinions which were gradually accumulated from the days of Adam down to about the middle of the seventeenth century (yes-the seventeenth century; nothing original has been said since then), and expressed by the foremost writers and rhetoricians of these times. These have resolved themselves into that great code which is called the experience of actual life. All our moral speculations, all our political and religious systems, all our poetical analogies and illustrations, invariably accept this as the groundwork upon which they rest. Whig and Tory, Formalist and Realist, Papist and Presbyterian, indifferently start from this, and they merely quarrel as to which of them comes nearest the mark. It is quite as much the creed of the wildest radical as of the most obstructive conservative; for his Republican millennium is only an ideal application of the code. We have thus got into the rut, and so long as we continue in it repetition and monotony are inevitable. Now, to secure anything like originality, we must just turn round. Let us invert the world and ourselves. Shakspeare, and Milton, and Dante, and Augustine, and John Knox, and Bacon, and Newton thought so and so: therefore it is a mistake. They have said that we stand on our feet; we do not-we stand on our heads. What a prospect opens before us! It will take centuries to refute everything that has been written. None of the craft for at least six thousand years need again want occupation. The demand will be greater than the supply.

The golden age of genius will return— the Saturnian reign will be renewed. For the man who refutes Shak

A hundred summers have died away, and the Novum Organum is inaugurated. The lights of the old world have gone out, or rather been forcibly extinguished. They look on Shakspeare now as we used to look on Friar Bacon-a mine of exploded errors. A magnificent literature has arisen upon the timestained and trampled ruins. The British Museum runs from Charing Cross to Pimlico; and though the whole of the writers who have been refuted are stowed away in the cellars, it cannot hold half its treasures. Its sides are swollen, and it has a suffocating sensation about the gizzard.

We pass through the Athenian portals above which runs in Roman capitals a fitting inscription, (Naught is everything, and everything is naught,') and enter the noble hall of the National Library. Far as the eye can reach, the walls are covered with endless tomes. Though splendid in the morocco and gold of a diviner Heyday,' we are occasionally reminded of those we were accustomed to meet, ere we went down to darkness, down even unto Hades. But when we open a volume we find that a revolution has indeed taken place. Our contemporaries began at the beginning; the children of Israel began at the end; but the New World begins in the middle. It was the only novelty that was left, perhaps; and no precedent could be found for it, except perhaps among the nomadic nations who read Mr. James's novels.

A hundred light-footed Hebes are tripping through the spacious floors and along the airy domes; these are the national librarians. The old dynasty of Panizzi has been abolished, and a gentler dominion has succeeded.

'Thank you,' I replied, to a darkhaired damsel, who proffered her