months what ought to be the effect of years; namely, the wearying a
world soon nauseated with the /toujours perdrix/. With respect to the
last, it induces a man to write for momentary effects; to study a false
smartness of style and reasoning; to bound his ambition of durability to
the last day of the month; to expect immediate returns for labour; to
recoil at the "hope deferred" of serious works on which judgment is
slowly formed. The man of talent who begins young at periodicals, and
goes on long, has generally something crude and stunted about both his
compositions and his celebrity. He grows the oracle of small coteries;
and we can rarely get out of the impression that he is cockneyfied and
conventional. Periodicals sadly mortgaged the claims that Hazlitt, and
many others of his contemporaries, had upon a vast reversionary estate
of Fame. But I here speak too politically; to some the /res angustoe
domi/ leave no option. And, as Aristotle and the Greek proverb have it,
we cannot carve out all things with the knife of the Delphic cutler.

The second work that Maltravers put forth, at an interval of eighteen
months from the first, was one of a graver and higher nature; it served
to confirm his reputation: and that is success enough for a second work,
which is usually an author's "/pons asinorum/." He who, after a
triumphant first book, does not dissatisfy the public with a second, has
a fair chance of gaining a fixed station in literature. But now
commenced the pains and perils of the after-birth. By a maiden effort
an author rarely makes enemies. His fellow-writers are not yet prepared
to consider him as a rival; if he be tolerably rich, they unconsciously
trust that he will not become a regular, or, as they term it, "a
professional" author: he did something just to be talked of; he may
write no more, or his second book may fail. But when that second book
comes out, and does not fail, they begin to look about them; envy
wakens, malice begins. And all the old school--gentlemen who have