Looking more attentively at the patriarchs of literature, whose earner
was as long as it was brilliant, I thought I perceived that in the
busy and prolonged course of exertion, there were no doubt occasional
failures, but that still those who were favourites of their age
triumphed over these miscarriages. By the new efforts which they
made, their errors were obliterated, they became identified with the
literature of their country, and after having long received law from
the critics, came in some degree to impose it. And when such a writer
was at length called from the scene, his death first made the public
sensible what a large share he had occupied in their attention. I
recollected a passage in Grimm's Correspondence, that while the
unexhausted Voltaire sent forth tract after tract to the very close of
a long life, the first impression made by each as it appeared, was,
that it was inferior to its predecessors; an opinion adopted from the
general idea that the Patriarch of Ferney must at last find the point
from which he was to decline. But the opinion of the public finally
ranked in succession the last of Voltaire's Essays on the same footing
with those which had formerly charmed the French nation. The inference
from this and similar facts seemed to me to be, that new works were
often judged of by the public, not so much from their own intrinsic
merit, as from extrinsic ideas which readers had previously formed
with regard to them, and over which a writer might hope to triumph by
patience and by exertion. There is risk in the attempt;

"If he fall in, good night, or sink or swim."

But this is a chance incident to every literary attempt, and by which
men of a sanguine temper are little moved.