Base caitiff! but a truce to such miserable dreams. Let us resume the issue of our friend’s first literary adventure. For the first month after publication, the stature was more erect, the ears remarkably vigilant and on the stretch, the visits to the bookseller’s shop perpetual.
After an interval of a fortnight, with a tremulous voice the question was proposed, How do we get on? The reply was not the most exhilarating; I know not how we get on, but I know we do not go off. It was, however, subjoined in a consolatory tone, “Perhaps when we shall be noticed in the reviews, things may do better.”
Here a new string was vibrated upon. Those Gorgonian monsters, whose visionary aspect presented the dogs of Scylla, with more hands than Briareus, more eyes than Argus, to the disturbed imagination of the inexperienced author. He fancied to himself a solemn and formidable conclave of grave, severe, and profound scholars, with bushy wigs and frowning brows, formally assembled to pronounce their irreversible sentence upon every production of literary adventurers. The abrupt and sarcastic irony with which the efforts of some unfledged authors were dismissed, haunted him in his sleep, and appalled his very soul.
He knew better afterwards, being himself admitted behind the curtain, but in this dreadful interval, his anxiety was of no ordinary kind. He had perpetually before his eyes Homer’s description of Scylla and Charybdis.
No bird of air, no dove of swiftest wing,
That bears ambrosia to the ethereal king,
Shuns these dire rocks—in vain she cuts the skies,
The dire rocks meet, and crush her as she flies.
...
Here Scylla bellows from her dire abodes,