“Such as have the little herd-groomes
    That keepen beastes in the broomes.”

This is the true Valhalla of Mediocrity, the libra d’oro of the onymi-anonymi, of the never-named authors who exist only in name,—­Parson Adams would be here, had he found a printer for his sermons, Mr. Primrose for his tracts on Monogamy,—­and not merely such nominum umbroe of the past, but that still stranger class of ancient-moderns, preterite-presents, dead (and something more) as authors, but still to be met with in the flesh as solid men and brethren,—­privileged, alas, to outstay cockcrow when they drop in of an evening to give you their views on the aims and tendencies of periodical literature.  Will it be nothing, if we should be untimely snatched away from our present sphere of usefulness, to those shadowy [Greek:  pleiones] who lived too soon to enjoy their monthly dip in the ATLANTIC,—­will it be nothing, we say, that our orphaned Papyrorcetes, junior, will be able to read the name of his lamented parent on the nine-hundredth page of Allibone,—­occupying, at least, an entire line, and therefore (as we gather from a hasty calculation) sure forever of 1/360,000th of the attention of whoever reads the book through?  This is a handy and inexpensive substitute for the imagines of the Roman nobles; for those were inconvenient to pack on a change of lodgings, liable to melt in warm weather,—­even the elder Brutus himself might soften in August,—­and not readily salable, unless to a novus homo who wished to buy a set of ancestors ready-made, as some of our enthusiastic genealogists are said to order a family-tree from the heraldic nursery-man skilled to graft a slip of Scroggins on a stock of De Vere or Montmorenci.  Contemporary glory is comparatively dear; it is sold by the column,—­for columns have got over their Horatian antipathies; but the bibliographer will thank you for the name of any man that has ever printed a book, nay, his gratitude will glow in exact proportion to the obscurity of the author, and one may thus confer perpetuity at least (which is a kind of Tithonus-immortality) upon some respected progenitor, or assure it to himself, with little trouble and at the cost of a postage-stamp.

The benignity of Providence is nowhere more strongly marked than in its compensations; and what can be more beautiful than the arrangement by which the same harmless disinterestedness of matter and style that once made an author the favorite of trunk-makers and grocers should, by thus leading to the quiet absorption of his works, make them sure of commemoration by Brunet or Lowndes and of commanding famine-prices under the hammer?  Fame, like electricity, is thus positive and negative; and if a writer must be Somebody to make himself of permanent interest to the world at large, he must not less be Nobody—­like Junius—­to have his namelessness embalmed by Mons. Guerard.  Take comfort, therefore, all ye who either make paper