considerable loser. Did I publish all I admire, out of sympathy with the
author, I should be a ruined man. But suppose that, impressed as I
really am with the evidence of no common poetic gifts in this manuscript,
I publish it, not as a trader, but a lover of literature, I shall in
reality, I fear, render you a great disservice, and perhaps unfit your
whole life for the exertions on which you must rely for independence."

"How, sir?" cried Leonard. "Not that I would ask you to injure yourself
for me," he added, with proud tears in his eyes.

"How, my young friend? I will explain. There is enough talent in these
verses to induce very flattering reviews in some of the literary
journals. You will read these, find yourself proclaimed a poet, will cry
'I am on the road to fame.' You will come to me, 'And my poem, how does
it sell?' I shall point to some groaning shelf, and say, 'Not twenty
copies! The journals may praise, but the public will not buy it.'
'But you will have got a name,' you say. Yes, a name as a poet just
sufficiently known to make every man in practical business disinclined to
give fair trial to your talents in a single department of positive life;
none like to employ poets;--a name that will not put a penny in your
purse,--worse still, that will operate as a barrier against every escape
into the ways whereby men get to fortune. But having once tasted praise,
you will continue to sigh for it: you will perhaps never again get a
publisher to bring forth a poem, but you will hanker round the purlieus
of the Muses, scribble for periodicals, fall at last into a bookseller's
drudge. Profits will be so precarious and uncertain, that to avoid debt
may be impossible; then, you who now seem so ingenuous and so proud, will
sink deeper still into the literary mendicant, begging, borrowing--"

"Never! never! never!" cried Leonard, veiling his face with his hands.