Page:Biographia literaria; or, Biographical sketches of my literary life and opinions (IA biographialitera04cole).pdf/49

 the appeal to the bad and malignant passions of mankind. Especially "in this, this age of literary and political , when the meanest insects are worshipped with a sort of Egyptian superstition, if only the brainless head be atoned for by the sting of personal malignity in the tail! When the most vapid satires have become the objects of a keen public interest purely from the number of contemporary characters named in the patch-work notes (which possess, however, the comparative merit of being more poetical than the text), and because, to increase the stimulus, the author has sagaciously left his own name for whispers and conjectures!—In an age, when even sermons are published with a double appendix stuffed with names—in a generation so transformed from the characteristic reserve of Britons, that from the ephemeral sheet of a London newspaper to the everlasting Scotch Professorial Quarto, almost every publication exhibits or flatters the epidemic distemper; that the very "last year's rebuses" in the Lady's Diary, are answered in a serious elegy "on my father's death" with the name and habitat of the elegiac Œdipus subscribed; and "other ingenious solutions were likewise given" to the said rebuses—not, as heretofore, by Crito, Philander, A B, Y, &c. but by fifty or sixty plain English sirnames at full length, with their several places of abode! In an age, when a bashful Philalethes, or Phileleutheros is as rare on the title-pages and among the signatures of our magazines, as a real name used to be in the days of our shy and notice-shunning grandfathers! When (more exquisite than all) I see an (spirits of Maro and Mæonides, make ready to welcome your new compeer!) advertised with the special recommendation, that the said  contains more than a hundred names of living persons." 10 But as it is the nature of scorn, envy, and all malignant propensities to require a quick change of objects, such writers are sure, sooner or later, to awake from their dream of vanity to disappointment and neglect with embittered and envenomed feelings. Even du-