history of the Middle Ages. The founders of the Edinburgh Review, and the ablest writers for it, were all of them young men-Jeffrey, Macintosh, Brougham, Smith.

Certain persons cannot see, that judgment, where it is the nicest, most tolerant, and comprehensive, and exact, is not always the fruit of study nor the growth of experience. It often precedes both; and is an instinctive faculty—an original talent-applying this truth to the instances of a low judgment in matters (not of literature or philosophy, as we have considered it) relating to ordinary business. Steele has a paper of excellent sense and liberal tendency in the Lover, written with his accustomed facility and grace. The writer of the thoughts on the subject is supposed to be a correspondent, a young man, who complains bitterly of "a general calamity that obstructs or suspends the advancement of the younger men in the pursuit of their fortune"-(a complaint not to be rashly made in this country). "The utmost inconveniences are owing to the difficulty we meet with in being admitted into the society of men in years, and adding thereby the early knowledge of men and business to that of books, for the reciprocal improvement of each other. One of fifty as naturally imagines the same insufficiency in one of thirty, as he of thirty does of one of fifteen, and each age is thus left to instruct itself by the natural course of its own reflection and experience." Further on, he remarks thus: "Of the common divisions of business, which everybody knows are directed by form, and require rather diligence and honesty than grave ability in the execution." Truly enough, most business is purely mechanical; and the so-styled learned professions are as mechanical in their pedantic adherence to forms, as any branch of mechanics. The true conclusion Steele aims at, is couched in the following passage, which appears to us

to hit the truth with accuracy and justice :-"A good judgment will not only supply, but go beyond experience; for the latter is only a knowledge that directs us in the dispatch of matters future, from the consideration of matters past of the same nature; but the former is a perpetual and equal direction in everything that can happen, and does not follow, but makes the precedent that guides the other."

If we come nearer home, and take our examples from American literature, we shall be taught to look with generosity on young writers, and take heed lest we merit the wise censure of Cowley, who has written, "it is an envious frost that which nips the blossoms, because they appear quickly." Hardly an instance in American literature of a late writer of the first class, can be referred to. Our poets have been wonderfully precocious. Bryant can be paralleled only by Coleridge. Thanatopsis was written at eighteen; we recollect no poem of equal excellence produced so early by any poet, save the author of the Ancient Mariner. Yet Bryant has done nothing finer. The only wonder is, that he alone has preserved his poetical faculty, pure and fresh, still. Dana, his contemporary, has long been silent; so, too, we may say, of Halleck and their compeers, Pierpoint, Sprague, and Percival. Four of our most promising bards died young-Drake and Eastburn, and Sands and Brainard. The true successors, in some cases their equals, or their superiors, are still young-Holmes, Willis, Longfellow, Mathews, and Lowell. Our best fiction was written by young men, Cooper and Brown, who produced "Wieland" at twenty seven. Irving and Paulding have long since concluded their career as masterly comic satirists. Webster's later speeches are not equal Wirt neglected literature as soon as he began to rise in his profession. But, of former cases in point,

to his first orations.

we suspect it is not generally known that our great men, of the Revolutionary age, were uncommonly premature. Fisher Ames made a great speech at the age of twenty-three. Hamilton, a youth, wrote essays ascribed to Jay. Jay, still a young man, wrote the address to the people of Great Britain, just previous to the Revolution. Washington, at twentythree, was commander of the Virginia forces. Patrick Henry and Jefferson were both of them greatly distinguished before thirty. At present, our leading periodical writers, active politicians, clergymen, and men of letters generally, are, in nine cases out of ten, as might readily be shown, if it were proper to mention names, men under thirty years of age. It is, therefore, dangerous to advise a young man, or any man of ability, to refrain from composition, or any walk of active life, unless the critic be well assured that he is of at least equal rank in respect to abilities and acquisitions, that no tendency of jealousy or feeling of envy can be possibly ascribed to him, and that he possess an assemblage of qualities, mental and moral, that rarely falls to the lot of a single individual. Let it be remembered, too, that to be worthily received, and have its due weight, advice must be sought; else it will be justly regarded in the light of an impertinent intrusion and voluntary censure.

XXI.

NOTORIETY.

A WRITER who could unite the philosophy of Bacon and the satire of Churchill, would be the author to undertake an essay on Notoriety. In the absence of any such extraordinary com

bination of talent, we venture to address ourselves to the subject; to revive certain moral sentiments of equal worth and antiquity, an abundant apology for which, if any were necessary, would be found in the very fact of the great excellence of the sentiments themselves.

Ancient fame has given place to modern notoriety. Solid repute is, now-a-days, lost in fashionable applause, and the hero and bard, whose praise has furnished the theme of centuries, is cast into the shade by the idol of the hour. Of the different varieties of notoriety attainable by the arts of intrigue, the quackeries of impudence, or the settled fraud. of a lifetime, we shall, after running over the titles of a few, confine ourselves at present, chiefly to notoriety in literature, to the means of making a reputation by cant, imposture, and the influence of fashion.

Notoriety is spurious fame; a desire of obtaining it, false ambition. One intoxicated with the love of public fame (in the lower view of fame), had rather be ill-known than unknown. At any sacrifice, he would make a name. He would be talked of, if not cared for; had rather be in men's mouths than in their hearts. He would be well spoken of rather than trivially thought of. It is not that he would be always praised-nay, sometimes he would prefer abuse, as an object of attack, and to give him an opportunity of replying to it. It is the weak man's diseased ambition; the fool's fame; the knave's bane; the courtier's life; the fopling's breath; the wise man's detestation; the honest man's disgust.

Notoriety is attached to every calling and profession, art, science, trade or mystery. There is nothing in life which it may not affect; no face it cannot assume.

It haunts the pulpit, the university, the bar, the surgeon's hall; it is found in political assemblies and literary meetings;

it rules supreme in the drawing-room, the theatre, the street, the watering-place, the tavern.

What ways and means are employed to accomplish the great end! what struggles and anxieties to appear what one is not! what endeavors to hide these very attempts! A private scandal, or a newspaper paragraph; an abusive letter written by the party in question to himself; a self-inflicted libel; a domestic quarrel; a course of libertinism made public; these are a few of the thousand baits to catch the public ear. A public official relieves a poor woman, the act is at once translated into the newspapers; a wealthy citizen has fallen ill, it is immediately chronicled; a valuable shawl is worn by the wife of a celebrated statesman, it is universally made known. It is the whole business of the entire lives of most of the butterflies of fashion, to plot how they shall make themselves conspicuous from day to day. Absurdities in dress or equipage are getting to be stale devices; what we shall have next, we are wanting in imagination to conceive.

How to make a reputation in letters, is a nice problem for him to solve who has neither learning, genius, talents, nor enthusiasm. It is generally persons devoid of these fundamental requisites that most affect the fame of author and scholar; though it must be confesesd, their purposes are ulterior, and do not rest in the bare enjoyment of a name. They catch at the chance of reputation for the sake of an introduction into what is called (one would think from irony) good society, or even for the mere gratification of seeing their names in print.

Cant in literature is, next to cant in religion, the most despicable thing in the world; the cant of the pretenders to literature is always so thorough-going as quite to obscure a