Page:Lives of Poets-Laureate.djvu/75

Rh And would you struggle to be ranked among the great, you should be patient under the attacks of the small. We shall find that the master spirits of each age have mostly lived in friendship, and held sweet counsel together. It is among the lesser aspirants for fame that petty passions and little jealousies have broken out. The giants know their intellectual strength and stature, and reign each in his own kingdom supreme, but on terms of amity with foreign powers, while the dwarfs and pigmies, whose territories in the world of letters are small, whose boundaries uncertain and undefined, wage with each other an unceasing warfare, and only band together to attack their common superior, and therefore common foe. So, while all attempts to prove that any feud existed between the gentle Shakespeare and the learned Ben Jonson fall to the ground, there is no doubt whatever that with Dekker, Marston, Gill and others, our poet carried on endless hostilities.

It is sad that a profession which might rank so high, should enjoy so unenviable a notoriety; but true it is, that in the republic of letters the Temple of Janus is never shut. One need not indulge in visionary hopes of the perfectibility of human nature to believe that, although this state of things cannot be entirely got rid of, it will undergo and is undergoing great and rapid change for the better. Literature has escaped the degrading influences of patronage. For a book to be now successful it is no longer deemed necessary that it should have attached to it the name of an aristocrat, or be cumbered with a dedication teeming with servile if not blasphemous adulation. An author now at once addresses himself to his audience. If he can instruct or interest or amuse his fellow-men, he will not lack reward for his labours without stooping to fawn and flatter. Under such a system, there is between writers a loftier rivalry, a diviner emulation. It is not an