The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr.

  If I were a writer of books, I would compile a register, with a comment, of the various deaths of men; and it could not but be useful, for he who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live.

  He that commeth in print because he woulde be knowen, is like the foole that commeth into the Market because he woulde be seen.

  Hoping that his name may deserve to appear not among the mercenary crew of false pretenders to learning, but the free and ingenious sort of such as evidently were born to study, and love learning for itself, not for lucre, or any other end than the service of God and truth, and perhaps that lasting fame and perpetuity of praise which God and good men have consented shall be the reward of those whose published labours advance the good of mankind.

  A man starts upon a sudden, takes Pen, Ink and Paper, and without ever having had a thought of it before, resolves within himself he will write a Book; he has no Talent at Writing, but he wants fifty Guineas.

  I profess writing news from the learned, as well as the busy world. As for my labours, which he is pleased to inquire after, if they can but wear one impertinence out of human life, destroy a single vice, or give a morning’s cheerfulness to an honest mind, in short, if the world can be but one virtue the better, or in any degree less vicious, or receive from them the smallest addition to their innocent diversions, I shall not think my pains, or indeed my life, to have been spent in vain.

  If writings are thus durable, and may pass from age to age through the whole course of time, how careful should an author be of committing anything to print that may corrupt posterity and poison the minds of men with vice and error! Writers of great talents who employed their parts in propagating immorality, and seasoning vicious sentiments with wit and humour, are to be looked upon as the pests of society, and the enemies of mankind. They leave books behind them (as it is said of those who die in distempers which breed an ill-will towards their own species) to scatter infection and destroy their posterity. They act the counterparts of a Confucius or a Socrates; and seem to have been sent into the world to deprave human nature and sink it into the condition of brutality.

  If we look back into past times, we find innumerable names of authors once in high reputation, read perhaps by the beautiful, quoted by the witty, and commented on by the grave, but of whom we now know only that they existed. If we consider the distribution of literary fame in our own time, we shall find it a possession of very uncertain tenure; sometimes bestowed by a sudden caprice of the public, and again transferred to a new favourite, for no other reason than that he is new; sometimes refused to long labour and eminent desert, and sometimes granted to very slight pretensions; lost sometimes by security and negligence, and sometimes by too diligent endeavours, to retain it. A successful author is equally in danger of the diminution of his fame, whether he continues or ceases to write. The regard of the public is not to be kept but by tribute, and the remembrance of past service will quickly languish unless successive performances frequently revive it. Yet in every new attempt there is new hazard, and there are few who do not, at some unlucky time, injure their own characters by attempting to enlarge them.

  Of all rewards, I grant, the most pleasing to a man of real merit is fame; but a polite age of all times is that in which scarcely any share of merit can acquire it. What numbers of fine writers in the latter empire of Rome, when refinement was carried to the highest pitch, have missed that fame and immortality which they had fondly arrogated to themselves! How many Greek authors, who wrote at the period when Constantinople was the refined mistress of the empire, now rest, either not printed, or not read, in the libraries of Europe! Those who came first, while either state as yet was barbarous, carried all the reputation away. Authors, as the age refined, became more numerous, and their numbers destroyed their fame. It is but natural, therefore, for the writer, when conscious that his works will not procure him fame hereafter, to endeavour to make them turn out to his temporal interest here. Whatever be the motives which induce men to write, whether avarice or fame, the country becomes most wise and happy in which they most serve for instructors.

  Writers, especially when they act in a body, and in one direction, have great influence on the public mind.

  Authors stand between the governors and the governed, and form the single organ of both. Those who govern a nation cannot at the same time enlighten the people, for the executive power is not empirical; and the governed cannot think, for they have no continuity of leisure.

  When, at the distance of more than half a century, Christianity was assaulted by a Woolston, a Tindal, and a Morgan, it was ably supported both by clergymen of the established church and writings among Protestant dissenters. The labours of a Clarke and a Butler were associated with those of a Doddridge, a Leland, and a Lardner, with such equal reputation and success as to make it evident that the intrinsic excellence of a religion needs not the aid of external appendages; but that, with or without a dowry, her charms are of sufficient power to fix and engage the heart.

  The society of dead authors has this advantage over that of the living: they never flatter us to our faces, nor slander us behind our backs, nor intrude upon our privacy, nor quit their shelves until we take them down. Besides, it is always easy to shut a book, but not quite so easy to get rid of a lettered coxcomb. Living authors, therefore, are usually bad companions: if they have not gained a character, they seek to do so by methods often ridiculous, always disgusting; and if they have established a character, they are silent, for fear of losing by their tongue what they have acquired by their pen: for many authors converse much more foolishly than Goldsmith who have never written half so well.

  Just such is the feeling which a man of liberal education naturally entertains towards the great minds of former ages. The debt which he owes to them is incalculable. They have guided him to truth. They have filled his mind with noble and graceful images. They have stood by him in all vicissitudes, comforters in sorrow, nurses in sickness, companions in solitude. These friendships are exposed to no danger from the occurrences by which other attachments are weakened or dissolved. Time glides on; fortune is inconstant; tempers are soured; bonds which seemed indissoluble are daily sundered by interest, by emulation, or by caprice. But no such cause can affect the silent converse which we hold with the highest of human intellects. That placid intercourse is disturbed by no jealousies or resentments. These are the old friends who are never seen with new faces, who are the same in wealth and in poverty, in glory and in obscurity. With the dead there is no rivalry. In the dead there is no change. Plato is never sullen. Cervantes is never petulant. Demosthenes never comes unseasonably. Dante never stays too long. No difference of political opinion can alienate Cicero. No heresy can excite the horror of Bossuet.

  Authors’ lives in general are not uniform—they are strangely checquered by vicissitudes; and even were the outward circumstances uniform, the inward struggles must still be various.

  Those works of fiction are worse than unprofitable that inculcate morality, with an exclusion of all reference to religious principle. This is obviously and notoriously the character of Miss Edgeworth’s Moral Tales. And so entire and resolute is this exclusion, that it is maintained at the expense of what may be called poetical truth; it destroys, in many instances, the probability of the tale, and the naturalness of the characters. That Christianity does exist, every one must believe as an incontrovertible truth; nor can any one deny that, whether true or false, it does exercise—at least is supposed to exercise—an influence on the feelings and conduct of some of the believers in it. To represent, therefore, persons of various ages, sex, country, and station in life, as practising, on the most trying occasions, every kind of duty, and encountering every kind of danger, difficulty, and hardship, while none of them ever makes the least reference to a religious motive, is as decidedly at variance with reality—what is called in works of fiction unnatural—as it would be to represent Mahomet’s enthusiastic followers as rushing into battle without any thought of his promised paradise.

  Unless a man can link his written thoughts with the everlasting wants of men, so that they shall draw from them as from wells, there is no more immortality to the thoughts and feelings of the soul than to the muscles and the bones.

  Whatever an author puts between the two covers of his book is public property; whatever of himself he does not put there is his private property, as much as if he had never written a word.

  The great and good do not die even in this world. Embalmed in books, their spirits walk abroad. The book is a living voice. It is an intellect to which one still listens.

  Nobody is interesting to all the world. An author who is spoken of as universally admired will find, if he is foolish enough to inquire, that there are not wanting intelligent persons who are indifferent to him, nor yet those who have a special emphatic dislike to him. If there were another Homer, there would be another Homeromastix. An author should know that the very characteristics which make him the object of admiration to many, and endear him to some among them, will render him an object of dislike to a certain number of individuals of equal, it may be of superior intelligence. Doubtless God never made a better berry than the strawberry, yet it is a poison to a considerable number of persons. There are those who dislike the fragrance of the water-lily, and those in whom the smell of a rose produces a series of those convulsions known as sneezes. He (or she) who ventures into authorship must expect to encounter occasional instances of just such antipathy, of which he and all that he does are the subjects. Let him take it patiently. What is thus out of accord with the temperament or the mood of his critic may not be blamable; nay, it may be excellent. But Zoilus does not like it or the writer,—the reason why he can not tell, perhaps, but he does not like either; and he is in his rights, and the author must sit still and let the critic play off his idiosyncrasies against his own.

  It is almost superfluous to say that in the profession of literature the first requisite is ability to see, to feel, and to think, and a great part of this ability is education. Without education no one can expect to become a writer, and the more education the better, provided it be of the right sort. There are two objects to be attained by education. The first is knowledge, and the second is accuracy. Accuracy is the power of distinguishing the truth, and of expressing truth as it is…. The best school of writing is a newspaper office, with intelligence at the head. No other college is possible where the discipline of rhetoric, or taste, and of knowledge is so effectually applied. The first rule of good writing is to use always the simplest and plainest words. State the fact or express the point or principle which you desire to convey, so that every reader will understand it exactly as you intend it to be understood. Have only one idea in view at a time, and be sure that you have expressed it clearly and intelligently before you go to another. Above all, avoid affectation, and the worst affectation of all is the affectation of wit. The highest intellectual gift is the power to know the truth. Next to this is judgment; next, wit; and the greatest of all intellectual qualities is imagination. The writer who possesses imagination may become immortal.

  It is by the number and charm of the individualities which it contains that the literature of any country gains distinction. We turn anywhither to know men. The best way to foster literature, if it may be fostered, is to cultivate the author himself—a plant of such delicate and precarious growth that special soils are needed to produce him in his full perfection. The conditions which foster individuality are those which foster simplicity, thought and action from self out, naturalness, and spontaneity. What are these conditions? In the first place, a certain helpful ignorance. It is best for the author to be born away from literary centers, or to be excluded from their ruling set if he be born in them. It is best that he start out with his thinking, not knowing how much has been thought and said about everything. A certain amount of ignorance will insure his sincerity, will increase his boldness and shelter his genuineness, which is his hope of power. Not ignorance of life, but life may be learned in any neighborhood;—not ignorance of the greater laws which govern human affairs, but they may be learned without a library of historians and commentators, by imaginative sense, by seeing better than by reading;—not ignorance of the infinitudes of human circumstance, but knowledge of these may come to a man without the intervention of universities;—not ignorance of one’s self and of one’s neighbor, but innocence of the sophistications of learning, its research without love, its knowledge without inspiration, its method without grace; freedom from its shame at trying to know many things as well as from its pride of trying to know but one thing; ignorance of that faith in small confounding facts which is contempt for large reassuring principles.

  This sudden display of nervousness on the part of authors is perhaps partly due to their unreasonable confusion of the Reviewers with the Readers. The great mass of criticism is delivered vivâ voce and never appears in print at all. This spoken criticism is of far greater importance than printed criticism. It is repeated again and again, in all sorts of places, on hundreds of occasions, and cannot fail to make dints in people’s minds, whereas the current printed criticism of the week runs lightly off the surface. “Press notices,” as they are called, have no longer “boodle” in them, if I may use a word the genius of Mr. Stevenson has already consecrated for all delightful use. The pen may, in peaceful times, be mightier than the sword, but in this matter of criticism of our contemporaries the tongue is mightier than the pen. Authors should remember this. Mr. Buchanan’s temper would be sweeter than it is had he done so. Few authors fare better in ordinary talk than Mr. Buchanan, to whom justice as a poet, a novelist, and a dramatist is always done. I presume from his stormy outcry that he is not a favourite with certain critics who publish, but what harm have they been able to do to him? You find him everywhere: in the cheerful playhouse, in the illustrated papers, on posters, in libraries. You can’t have everybody on your side. Shakespeare had a contemporary who used to sneer at him in print.

  An author, after all, is a man and, as all men ought to be, a work-man. His power comes to this, that he is man with a special capacity for exciting sympathy. That he should be a good work-man, therefore, goes without saying; and it follows that he should have a sense of responsibility in whatever department he undertakes; that he should not bestow his advice upon us without qualifying himself to be a competent adviser; nor write philosophical speculation without serious study of philosophy; nor, if possible, produce poetry or even fiction without filling his mind by observation or training it by sympathy with the great movements of thought which are shaping the world in which we live. It is a sort of paradox which can not be avoided, that we must warn a man that one condition of all good work is that it should be spontaneous and yet tell him that it should be directed to make men better and happier. It seems to be saying that the conscious pursuit of a given end would be inconsistent with the attainment of the end. Yet I believe that this is a paradox which can be achieved in practice, on the simple condition of a reasonable modesty. The author, that is, should not listen to those who would exaggerate the importance of his work. The world can get on very well without it; and even the greatest men are far more the product than the producers of the intellectual surroundings. The acceptance of that truth—I hold it to be a truth—will help to keep in check the exaggerated estimate of the importance of making a noise in the world which is our besetting sin, and help to make a regulating principle of what is a theoretical belief, that a man who is doing honestly good work in any department, whether under the eyes of a multitude or of a few, will be happiest if he can learn to take pleasure in doing it thoroughly rather than in advertising it widely. And, finally, with that conviction we shall be less liable to the common error of an author who grumbles at his want of success, and becomes morbid and irritable and inclined to lower his standard, when in reality he ought to remember that he is as unreasonable as a marksman who should complain of the target for keeping out of the line of fire. “It is my own fault” is often a bitter reflection, but a bitter may be a very wholesome tonic.

  Time was—and it is not so very long ago—that an author, when he sat down to write a book, felt as if he were approaching a devout task. He felt as if the pen were a sacred instrument: the book a gospel. He lived a sane life: that is, he feared God and slept eight hours every night,—and when a man does those two things he is sane and very far removed from pessimism.

  Every great writer is a friend of all the world, one whom we may come to know, who can aid us with solace and counsel and entertainment. In his books he has revealed himself, and in them we make his acquaintance. This is the purpose of serious reading. Not merely to be delighted with beauty of style; not merely to be informed and made wise; not merely to be encouraged and ennobled in spirit; but to receive an impetus in all these directions. Such is the object of culture. To know a good book is to know a good man. To be influenced by a trivial, or ignoble, or false book, is to associate with an unworthy companion, and to suffer the inevitable detriment. For the book, like the man, must be so true that it convinces our reason and satisfies our curiosity; it must be so beautiful that it fascinates and delights our taste; it must be so spirited and right-minded that it enlists our best sympathy and stirs our more humane emotions. A good book, like a good comrade, is one that leaves us happier or better off in any way for having known it. A bad book is one that leaves us the poorer, either by confusing our reason with what is not true, or by debasing our taste with what is ugly, or by offending our spirit with what is evil.