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230 THEORIES OF STYLE IN LITERATURE
another delusion, by which all parties disguise the truth, is
the absurd belief that, not being read at present, a book may,
however,
be revived hereafter. Believe it not ! This is
possible only with regard to books that demand to be studied,
where the merit is slowly discovered. Every month, every
day indeed, produces its own novelties, with the additional
zest that they are novelties. Every future year, which will
assuredly fail in finding time for its own books, how should
it find time for defunct books ? No, no; every year buries its
own literature.
of fifty
Since Waterloo there have been added upwards
thousand books and pamphlets to the shelves of our
native literature, taking no account of foreign importations.
Of these fifty
thousand possibly two hundred still survive ;
possibly twenty will survive for a couple of centuries ;
possibly five or six thousand may have been indifferently
read; the rest not so much as opened. In this hasty sketch
of a calulation we assume a single copy to represent a whole
edition. But, in order to have the total sum of copies numerically
neglected since Waterloo, it will be requisite to
multiply forty-four thousand by five hundred at the least, but
probably by a higher multiplier. At the very moment of
writing this
by way of putting into a brighter light the inconceivable
blunder as to publicity habitually committed by
sensible men of the world
let us mention what we now see
before us in a public journal. Speaking with disapprobation
of a just but disparaging expression applied to the French
war-mania by a London morning paper, the
writer has described
it as likely to irritate the people of France. O genius
of arithmetic The !
offending London journal has a circulation
of four thousand copies daily; and it is assumed that
thirty-three millions, of whom assuredly not twenty-five
individuals will ever see the English paper as a visible object
nor five ever read the passage in question, are to be mad-