"The public of the present day"—Ang. the subscribers to the circulating libraries—constitute, to his cultivated mind, a world unknown. The public he has been wasting his life to address, is such a public as was addressed by Addison, by Swift, by Steele, or by the greater writers of the days of Elizabeth. "Bless his fine wits," we could laugh at his misconception, were we not rather inclined to cry! In instances easy to be cited, (but that there were miching malecho in the deed,) insult has been added to injury, and the anguish depicted in the face of the mortified man of letters been assuaged by friendly advice to "try his hand at something more saleable—something in the style of Harrison Ainsworth or Peter Priggins!"
O ye Athenians! to what base uses have we come, by the influence of your malpractices of old!
But all this is far from the blackest side of the picture. You have seen only the fortunes of the rejected of the circulating libraries; wait till you have studied the fate of their favourites—victims whom, like the pet-dogs of children, the publishers force to stand on their hind-legs, and be bedizened in their finery; or pet pussy-cats, whom they fondle into wearing spectacles and feeding on macaroones, instead of pursuing their avocations as honest mousers. The favourite author of the circulating libraries has a great deal to envy in the treadmill!
In the days when there existed a reading, in place of a skimming public—in the days when circulating libraries were not—the writer who followed his own devices in the choice of the subject, plot, title, treatment, and extent of his book, and made his labour a labour of love, had some chance of being cherished as the favourite of the fireside; installed on the shelf, and taken down, like Goldsmith or Defoe or Bunyan, for an hour's gossip; cried over by the young girl of the family, diverting the holiday of the schoolboy, and exercising the eyesight of the good old grandmother. But how is this ever to be achieved nowadays? Who will be ever thumbed over and spelled over as these have been?
"Invent another Vicar or another Crusoe," say the critics, "and you will see."
We should not see! No bookseller would publish them, because "no circulating library would take them;" for these bibliopoles know to a page what will be taken. Several of them have got, and several others have had, the conduct of a circulating library on their hands; and so far from venturing to present a single-volumed or double-volumed work to their subscribers, they would insist upon the dilution of the genius of Oliver or Daniel into the adequate number of pages ere they risked paper and print. O public! O dear, ingenuous public! Think how you might have ceased to delight in even the cosmogony-man, if his part had been a hundred times rehearsed in your ears; or what the matchless Lady Blarney and the incomparable Miss Carolina Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs (I love, as old Primrose says, to repeat the whole name) might have become, as the "light conversationists" of three octavo volumes! Shakspeare was forced to kill Mercutio early in the play, lest Mercutio should kill him. We feel a devout conviction that Miss Carolina Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs would have burked Goldsmith!
And then the incomparable Robinson! Conceive the interlarding of a funny Mrs Friday to eke out the matter, with a comical king of the Cannibal islands "to lighten the story"—according to circulating library demand! Unhappy Defoe! thy standing in the pillory had been as nothing compared with such a condemnation!
We beseech you, therefore, deluded public, when assured by critical misleadment that such writers no longer exist, do, as you are often requested to do by letters in the newspapers—from parties remanded by the police-offices for some hanging matter—"suspend your judgment," or you will deserve credit for very little. We promise you that there are giants on the earth in these days, ay, and famous giants of their cubits! But when a giant is made to drivel, his drivelings are very little better than those of a pigmy. And we swear to you, (under correction from the parish vestry, which is entitled to half-a-crown an oath,) that the circulating libraries would make a driveler of Seneca! Under the circulating library tyranny, Johnson himself would have been forced to break up his long words into smaller pieces, to supply due volume for three volumes.
Above all, we have no hesitation in declaring that the circulating libraries are indictable for manslaughter, in the matter of the death of Scott. They killed him, body and soul! In better times, when books were bought, not hired, the sale of the first half dozen of his mighty novels would have sufficed both the public and the author for thrice as many years. They would have been purchased by all people of good condition, as the works of Richardson were purchased, and read, and conned, and got by heart. But behold! the circulating libraries "wanted novelty." It suited them better to invest their capital in half a dozen new and trashy books—such as extend their catalogue from No. 2470 to 2500—instead of half a dozen copies of the one sterling work, which increases their stock in trade and diminishes their stock in consols, but leaves the catalogue, which is the advertisement of their perfections, halting at No. 2470.
Now, as it happened that the same boss of constructiveness which has endowed our language with such a world of creations from the pen of Scott, betrayed him also into inventiveness per force of brick and mortar—just as the same bent of genius which created the Castle of Otranto, created also that other colossus of lath and plaster, Strawberry Hill—the author of the Scotch novels was fain to sacrifice to the evil genius of the times; and behold! as the assiduous slave of the circulating libraries, he extinguished one of the greatest spirits of Great Britain. But for the hateful factory system of the twice three volumes per annum, he would have been still alive among us—happy and happy-making, in a green old age—watching over the maturity of his grandchildren, and waited upon by the worship of the land.