it; that it shall be the talk of every circle; its incidents set to
music, its plot dramatized; that it shall count readers by thousands
while others count readers by scores; while yet one cannot really
see why any of the others might not have taken its place. Or of a
score of coarse comic songs, nineteen shall never get beyond the
walls of the Cyder Cellars (I understand there is a place of the
name), while the twentieth, no wise superior in any respect, comes to
be sung about the streets, known by everybody, turned into polkas
and quadrilles and in fact to become for the time one of the
institutions of this great and intelligent country. I remember
how, a year or two since, that contemptible Rat-catcher's Daughter,
without a thing to recommend it, with no music, no wit, no sentiment,
nothing but vulgar brutality, might be heard in every separate town
of England and Scotland, sung about the streets by every ragged
urchin; while the other songs of the vivacious Cowell fell dead
from his lips. The will of the sovereign people has decided that
so it shall be. And as likings and dislikings in most cases are
things strongly felt, but impossible to account for even by the
person who feels them, so is it ffith the enormous admiration,
regard, and success which fall to the lot of many to whom popularity
is success. Actors, statesmen, authors, preachers, have often in
England their day of quite undeserved popular ovation; and by and
bye their day of entire neglect. It is the rocket and the stick.
We are told that Bishop Butler, about the period of the great
excesses of the French Revolution, was walking in his garden with
his chaplain. After a long fit of musing, the Bishop turned to the
chaplain, and asked the question whether nations might not go mad,
as well as individuals? Classes of society, I think, may certainly
have attacks of temporary insanity on some one point. The Jenny
Lind fever was such an attack. Such was the popularity of the