Yet it is unjust and unworthy in Marsh to disfigure his fine work on the English language by traducing all who now write that tongue.  “None seek the audience, fit, though few, which contented the ambition of Milton, and all writers for the press now measure their glory by their gains,” and so indefinitely onward,—­which is simply cant.  Does Sylvanus Cobb, Jr., who honestly earns his annual five thousand dollars from the “New York Ledger,” take rank as head of American literature by virtue of his salary?  Because the profits of true literature are rising,—­trivial as they still are beside those of commerce or the professions,—­its merits do not necessarily decrease, but the contrary is more likely to happen; for in this pursuit, as in all others, cheap work is usually poor work.  None but gentlemen of fortune can enjoy the bliss of writing for nothing and paying their own printer.  Nor does the practice of compensation by the page work the injury that has often been ignorantly predicted.  No contributor need hope to cover two pages of a periodical with what might be adequately said in one, unless he assumes his editor to be as foolish as himself.  The Spartans exiled Ctesiphon for bragging that he could speak the whole day on any subject selected; and a modern magazine is of little value, unless it has a Spartan at its head.

Strive always to remember—­though it does not seem intended that we should quite bring it home to ourselves—­that “To-Day is a king in disguise,” and that this American literature of ours will be just as classic a thing, if we do our part, as any which the past has treasured.  There is a mirage over all literary associations.  Keats and Lamb seem to our young people to be existences as remote and legendary as Homer, yet it is not an old man’s life since Keats was an awkward boy at the door of Hazlitt’s lecture-room, and Lamb was introducing Talfourd to Wordsworth as his own only admirer.  In reading Spence’s “Anecdotes,” Pope and Addison appear no farther off; and wherever I open Bacon’s “Essays,” I am sure to end at last with that one magical sentence, annihilating centuries, “When I was a child, and Queen Elizabeth was in the flower of her years.”

And this imperceptible transformation of the commonplace present into the storied past applies equally to the pursuits of war and to the serenest works of peace.  Be not misled by the excitements of the moment into overrating the charms of military life.  In this chaos of uniforms, we seem to be approaching times such as existed in England after Waterloo, when the splenetic Byron declared that the only distinction was to be a little undistinguished.  No doubt, war brings out grand and unexpected qualities, and there is a perennial fascination in the Elizabethan Raleighs and Sidneys, alike heroes of pen and sword.  But the fact is patent, that there is scarcely any art whose rudiments are so easy to acquire as the military; the manuals of tactics have no difficulties