me FLERE of Horace have written as if they did not believe a word of it; for they have been silent on their own convictions, suppressed their own experience, and falsified their own feelings to repeat the convictions and fine phrases of another.  I am sorry that my experience assures me that many of those who will read with complete assent all here written respecting the power of Sincerity, will basely desert their allegiance to the truth the next time they begin to write; and they will desert it because their misguided views of Literature prompt them to think more of what the public is likely to applaud than of what is worth applause; unfortunately for them their estimation of this likelihood is generally based on a very erroneous assumption of public wants:  they grossly mistake the taste they pander to.

In all sincere speech there is power, not necessarily great power, but as much as the speaker is capable of.  Speak for yourself and from yourself, or be silent.  It can be of no good that you should tell in your “clever” feeble way what another has already told us with the dynamic energy of conviction.  If you can tell us something that your own eyes have seen, your own mind has thought, your own heart has felt, you will have power over us, and all the real power that is possible for you.  If what you have seen is trivial, if what you have thought is erroneous, if what you have felt is feeble, it would assuredly be better that you should not speak at all; but if you insist on speaking Sincerity will secure the uttermost of power.

The delusions of self-love cannot be prevented, but intellectual misconceptions as to the means of achieving success may be corrected.  Thus although it may not be possible for any introspection to discover whether we have genius or effective power, it is quite possible to know whether we are trading upon borrowed capital, and whether the eagle’s feathers have been picked up by us, or grow from our own wings.  I hear some one of my young readers exclaim against the disheartening tendency of what is here said.  Ambitious of success, and conscious that he has no great resources within his own experience, he shrinks from the idea of being thrown upon his naked faculty and limited resources, when he feels himself capable of dexterously using the resources of others, and so producing an effective work.  “Why,” he asks, “must I confine myself to my own small experience, when I feel persuaded that it will interest no one?  Why express the opinions to which my own investigations have led me when I suspect that they are incomplete, perhaps altogether erroneous, and when I know that they will not be popular because they are unlike those which have hitherto found favour?  Your restrictions would reduce two-thirds of our writers to silence!”