If almost all Books were burnt (my own laid next the coal), I
sometimes in my spleen feel as if it really would be better with
us! Certainly could one generation of men be forced to live
without rhetoric, babblement, hearsay, in short with the tongue
well cut out of them altogether,--their fortunate successors
would find a most improved world to start upon! For Cant does
lie piled on us, high as the zenith; an Augean Stable with the
poisonous confusion piled so high: which, simply if there once
could be nothing said, would mostly dwindle like summer snow
gradually about its business, and leave us free to use our eyes
again! When I see painful Professors of Greek, poring in their
sumptuous Oxfords over dead _Greek_ for a thousand years or more,
and leaving live _English_ all the while to develop itself under
charge of Pickwicks and Sam Wellers, as if it were nothing and
the other were all things: this, and the like of it everywhere,
fills me with reflections! Good Heavens, will the people not
come out of their wretched Old-Clothes Monmouth-Streets, Hebrew
and other; but lie there dying of the basest pestilence,--dying
and as good as dead! On the whole, I am very weary of most
"Literature":--and indeed, in very sorrowful, abstruse humor
otherwise at present.
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