effected toward such an advancement of intelligence in the community, that
when this next tribe of highly endowed spirits should appear, they would
stand in much loss opprobrious contrast to the main body of the nation,
and find a much larger portion of it qualified to receive their
intellectual effusions. By this time, the class of persons who sought
knowledge on a wider scale than what sufficed for the ordinary affairs of
life, who took an interest in literature, and constituted the _Authors'
Public_, had indeed extended a little, extremely little, beyond the people
of condition, the persons educated in learned institutions, and those
whose professions involved some necessity, and might create some taste for
reading. Still they _were a class_, and that with a limitation marked and
palpable, to a degree very difficult for us now to conceive. They were in
contact, on the one side, with the great thinkers, moralists, poets, and
wits, but very slightly in communication with the generality of the people
on the other. They received the emanations from the assemblage of talent
and knowledge, but did not serve as conductors to convey them down
indefinitely into the community. The national body, regarded in its
intellectual character, had an inspirited and vigorous superior part, as
constituted of these men of eminent talents and attainments, and this
small class of persons in a measure assimilated to them in thinking and
taste; but it was in a condition resembling that of a human frame in
which, (through an injury in the spinal marrow,) some of the most
important functions of vitality have terminated at some precise limit
downward, leaving the inferior extremities devoid of sensation and the
power of action.

It is on record, that works admirably adapted to find readers and to make
them, had but an extremely confined and slowly widening circulation,
according to _our_ standard of the popular success of the productions of
distinguished talents. Nor did the writers _reckon_ on any such popular