influence.  He dedicates to some great man, and receives his compliments in return.  He appeals to some great name, and the Under-graduates of the two Universities look up to him as an oracle of wisdom.  He throws the weight of his verbal criticism and puny discoveries in black-letter reading into the gap, that is supposed to be making in the Constitution by Whigs and Radicals, whom he qualifies without mercy as dunces and miscreants; and so entitles himself to the protection of Church and State.  The character of his mind is an utter want of independence and magnanimity in all that he attempts.  He cannot go alone, he must have crutches, a go-cart and trammels, or he is timid, fretful, and helpless as a child.  He cannot conceive of any thing different from what he finds it, and hates those who pretend to a greater reach of intellect or boldness of spirit than himself.  He inclines, by a natural and deliberate bias, to the traditional in laws and government; to the orthodox in religion; to the safe in opinion; to the trite in imagination; to the technical in style; to whatever implies a surrender of individual judgment into the hands of authority, and a subjection of individual feeling to mechanic rules.  If he finds any one flying in the face of these, or straggling from the beaten path, he thinks he has them at a notable disadvantage, and falls foul of them without loss of time, partly to soothe his own sense of mortified self-consequence, and as an edifying spectacle to his legitimate friends.  He takes none but unfair advantages.  He twits his adversaries (that is, those who are not in the leading-strings of his school or party) with some personal or accidental defect.  If a writer has been punished for a political libel, he is sure to hear of it in a literary criticism.  If a lady goes on crutches and is out of favour at court, she is reminded of it in Mr. Gilford’s manly satire.  He sneers at people of low birth or who have not had a college-education, partly to hide his own want of certain advantages, partly as well-timed flattery to those who possess them.  He has a right to laugh at poor, unfriended, untitled genius from wearing the livery of rank and letters, as footmen behind a coronet-coach laugh at the rabble.  He keeps good company, and forgets himself.  He stands at the door of Mr. Murray’s shop, and will not let any body pass but the well-dressed mob, or some followers of the court.  To edge into the Quarterly Temple of Fame the candidate must have a diploma from the Universities, a passport from the Treasury.  Otherwise, it is a breach of etiquette to let him pass, an insult to the better sort who aspire to the love of letters—­and may chance to drop in to the Feast of the Poets.  Or, if he cannot manage it thus, or get rid of the claim on the bare ground of poverty or want of school-learning, he trumps up an excuse for the occasion, such as that “a man was confined in Newgate a short time before”—­it is not a lie