Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book

[216] Cousin and Jouffroy, and he who remembers the rise and fall of all that ambitious school of French eclectics can hardly be sure of the permanence of Herbert Spencer, the first man since their day who has undertaken to explain the whole universe of being. How we used to read Hazlitt, whose very name is so forgotten that an accomplished author has lately duplicated the title of his most remarkable book, ‘Liber Amoris,’ without knowing that it had ever been used! What a charm Irving threw about the literary career of Roscoe; but who now recognizes his name? Ardent youths, eager to combine intellectual and worldly success, fed themselves in those days on ‘Pelham’ and ‘Vivian Grey;’ but these works are not now even included in ‘Courses of Reading’—that last infirmity of noble fames. One may look in vain through the vast mausoleum of Bartlett's ‘Dictionary of Quotations’ for even that one maxim of costume, which was ‘Pelham's’ bid for immortality.

Literary fame is, then, by no means a fixed increment, but a series of vibrations of the pendulum. Happy is that author who comes to be