There are very many, could one give the announcement:  but no such announcement can be given; therefore the parlour firesides must even put up with ——­ or what other stuff chance shovels in their way, and read, though with malediction all the time.  It is a great pity, but no man can help it.  We are now arrived seemingly pretty near the point when all criticism and proclamation in matters literary has degenerated into an inane jargon, incredible, unintelligible, inarticulate as the cawing of choughs and rooks; and many things in that as in other provinces, are in a state of painful and rapid transition.  A good book has no way of recommending itself except slowly and as it were accidentally from hand to hand.  The man that wrote it must abide his time.  He needs, as indeed all men do, the faith that this world is built not on falsehood and jargon but on truth and reason; that no good thing done by any creature of God was, is, or ever can be lost, but will verily do the service appointed for it, and be found among the general sum-total and all of things after long times, nay after all time, and through eternity itself.  Let him ‘cast his bread upon the waters,’ therefore, cheerful of heart; ‘he will find it after many days.’

“I know not why I write all this to you; it comes very spontaneously from me.  Let it be your satisfaction, the highest a man can have in this world, that the talent entrusted to you did not lie useless, but was turned to account, and proved itself to be a talent; and the ‘publishing world’ can receive it altogether according to their own pleasure, raise it high on the housetops, or trample it low into the street-kennels; that is not the question at all, the thing remains precisely what it was after never such raising and never such depressing and trampling, there is no change whatever in it.  I bid you go on, and prosper.

“One thing grieves me:  the tone of sadness, I might say of settled melancholy that runs through all your utterances of yourself.  It is not right, it is wrong; and yet how shall I reprove you?  If you knew me, you would triumphantly[A] for any spiritual endowment bestowed on a man, that it is accompanied, or one might say preceded as the first origin of it, always by a delicacy of organisation which in a world like ours is sure to have itself manifoldly afflicted, tormented, darkened down into sorrow and disease.  You feel yourself an exile, in the East; but in the West too it is exile; I know not where under the sun it is not exile.  Here in the Fog Babylon, amid mud and smoke, in the infinite din of ‘vociferous platitude,’ and quack outbellowing quack, with truth and pity on all hands ground under the wheels, can one call it a home, or a world?  It is a waste chaos, where we have to swim painfully for our life.  The utmost a man can do is to swim there like a man, and hold his peace.  For this seems to me a great truth, in any exile or