For instance, with us in England it
will do a bad book no _ultimate_ service, that it is written by a lord, or
a bishop, or a privy counsellor, or a member of Parliament--though,
undoubtedly, it will do an _instant_ service--it will sell an edition or
so. This being the case, it being certain that no rank will reprieve a bad
writer from _final_ condemnation, the sycophantic glorifier of the public
fancies his idol justified; but not so. A bad book, it is true, will not
be saved by advantages of position in the author; but a book moderately
good will be extravagantly aided by such advantages. Lectures on
_Christianity_, that happened to be respectably written and delivered, had
prodigious success in my young days, because, also, they happened to be
lectures of a prelate; three times the ability would not have procured
them any attention had they been the lectures of an obscure curate. Yet on
the other hand, it is but justice to say, that, if written with three
times _less_ ability, lawn-sleeves would not have given them buoyancy,
but, on the contrary, they would have sunk the bishop irrecoverably;
whilst the curate, favored by obscurity, would have survived for another
chance. So again, and indeed, more than so, as to poetry. Lord Carlisle,
of the last generation, wrote tolerable verses. They were better than Lord
Roscommon's, which, for one hundred and fifty years, the judicious public
has allowed the booksellers to incorporate, along with other refuse of the
seventeenth and eighteenth century, into the costly collections of the
'British Poets.
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