temporary name and reputation with the public at large, by that most
powerful of all adulation, the appeal to the bad and malignant
passions of mankind [11]. But as it is the nature of scorn, envy, and
all malignant propensities to require a quick change of objects, such
writers are sure, sooner or later, to awake from their dream of vanity
to disappointment and neglect with embittered and envenomed feelings.
Even during their short-lived success, sensible in spite of themselves
on what a shifting foundation it rests, they resent the mere refusal
of praise as a robbery, and at the justest censures kindle at once
into violent and undisciplined abuse; till the acute disease changing
into chronical, the more deadly as the less violent, they become the
fit instruments of literary detraction and moral slander. They are
then no longer to be questioned without exposing the complainant to
ridicule, because, forsooth, they are anonymous critics, and
authorized, in Andrew Marvell's phrase, as "synodical individuals" to
speak of themselves plurali majestatico! As if literature formed a
caste, like that of the Paras in Hindostan, who, however maltreated,
must not dare to deem themselves wronged! As if that, which in all
other cases adds a deeper dye to slander, the circumstance of its
being anonymous, here acted only to make the slanderer inviolable!
[12] Thus, in part, from the accidental tempers of individuals--(men
of undoubted talent, but not men of genius)--tempers rendered yet more
irritable by their desire to appear men of genius; but still more
effectively by the excesses of the mere counterfeits both of talent
and genius; the number too being so incomparably greater of those who
are thought to be, than of those who really are men of genius; and in
part from the natural, but not therefore the less partial and unjust
distinction, made by the public itself between literary and all other
property; I believe the prejudice to have arisen, which considers an
unusual irascibility concerning the reception of its products as