Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays

[41] there is none such in America. Provided an author says something noticeable, and obeys the ordinary rules of grammar and spelling, his immediate public asks little more; and if he attempts more, it is an even chance that it leads him away from favor. Indeed, within the last few years, it has come to be a sign of infinite humor to dispense with even these few rules, and spell as badly as possible. Yet even if you went to London or to Paris in search of this imaginary body of critics, you would not find them; there also you would find the transient and the immortal confounded together, and the transient often uppermost. Even a foreign country is not always, as has been said, a contemporaneous posterity. It is said that no American writer was ever so warmly received in England as Artemus Ward It is only the slow alembic of the years that finally extracts from this vast mass of literature its few immortal drops, and leaves the rest to perish.

I know of no tonic more useful for a young writer than to read carefully, in the English Reviews of seventy or eighty years ago, the crushing criticisms on nearly every author of that epoch who has achieved lasting fame. What cannot there be read, however, is the sterner history of those who were simply neglected. Look, for instance, at the career of Charles Lamb, who now seems to us a writer who must have disarmed opposition, and have been a favorite from the first. Lamb's “Rosamond gray” was published in 1798, and for two years was not even reviewed. His poems appeared during the same year. In 1815 he introduced Talfourd to Wordsworth as his own “only admirer.” In 1819 the series of “Essays of Elia” was begun, and Shelley wrote to Leigh Hunt that year: “When I think of such a mind as Lamb's, when I see ”