Page:Free Opinions, Freely Expressed on Certain Phases of Modern Social Life and Conduct.djvu/275

 "passed" through many papers, the publisher followed it up with an advertisement to the effect that "The first edition of Mr. Podgers's poems being exhausted, a Second will be ready in a few days." And here, it may as well be said for the rectitude of "Goose and Gridiron," things came to a standstill. Because the Little Poets seldom get beyond a second edition. When Podgers's first editions came back unsold from the provinces (as they did), attempts were made to dispose of them at fancy prices as a last resource,—such attempts naturally ending in disaster. The times are too hard, and people have too much to do with their money to part with any of it for first editions of Podgers or Stodgers. The public is a very shrewd one, moreover, and is not to be "taken in" by gnat-rhymers dancing up and down for an hour in the "discoverer's" artificial sunbeams. And the Superannuated, in his eager desire to assert himself as an oracular personage, forgets one very important fact, and this is, that being a Nobody he cannot be accepted as warrant for a Somebody. The public is not his child; he cannot whip it into admiring Mr. Podgers, or coerce its judgment respecting Mr. Stodgers. Its ways are wilful, and it has a ridiculous habit (considering what a Fool the critic imagines it to be) of preferring its own opinion to that of the Superannuated. It is capable, it thinks, what with Compulsory Education and the rest of it, of making its own choice. And on the whole it prefers the Great Poet,—the man who scorns to be "discovered" by an inferior intellect, and who makes his own way independently and with a grand indifference to the squabbling of