to laugh at them; but who shall say that they did not do their best, and, if they were stupid, pavonian, arrogant, self-sufficient, and top-heavy, that they were not honestly so?  I always liked that boast of Flaccus about his “monument harder than brass.”  It is a cheerful sight to see a poor devil of an author in his garret, snapping his fingers at the critics.  “No beggar,” wrote Pope, “is so poor but he can keep a cur, and no author so beggarly but he can keep a critic.”  And, after all, abuse is pleasanter than contemptuous and silent neglect.  I do honestly believe, that, if it were not for a little too much false modesty, every author, and especially the poets, would boldly and publicly anticipate posthumous fame.  Do you think that Sir Thomas Urquhart, when he wrote his “[Greek:  EKSKUBALAURON], or, The Discovery of a most Precious Jewel,” etc., fancied that the world would willingly let his reverberating words faint into whispers, and, at last, into utter silence?—­his “metonymical, ironical, metaphorical, and synecdochal instruments of elocution, in all their several kinds, artificially affected, according to the nature of the subject, with emphatical expressions in things of great concernment, with catachrestical in matters of meaner moment; attended on each side respectively with an epiplectic and exegetic modification, with hyperbolical, either epitatically or hypocoristically, as the purpose required to be elated or extenuated, they qualifying metaphors, and accompanied with apostrophes; and, lastly, with allegories of all sorts, whether apologal, affabulatory, parabolary, aenigmatic, or paroemial”?  Would you have thought that so much sesquipedality could die?  Certainly the Knight of Cromartie did not, and fully believing Posterity would feel an interest in himself unaccorded to any one of his contemporaries, he kindly and prudently appended the pedigree of the family of Urquharts, preserving every step from Adam to himself.  This may have been a vanity, but after all it was a good sturdy one, worthy of a gentleman who could not say “the sun was setting,” but who could and did say “our occidental rays of Phoebus were upon their turning oriental to the other hemisphere of the terrestrial globe.”  Alas! poor Sir Thomas, who must needs babble the foolish hopes which wiser men reticently keep cloistered in their own bosoms! who confessed what every scribbler thinks, and so gets laughed at,—­as wantons are carried to the round-house for airing their incontinent phraseology in the street, while Blowsalinda reads romances in her chamber without blushing.  Modesty is very well; but, after all, do not the least self-sufficient of us hope for something more than the dirty dollars,—­for kindness, affection, loving perusal, and fostering shelter, long after our brains have mouldered, and the light of our eyes has been quenched, and our deft fingers have lost their cunning, and the places that knew us have forgotten our mien and speech and port