If the reader wishes to see the bubbles of reputation that were floating, some of them gay with prismatic colors, half a century ago, he will find in the pages of “Truth” a long catalogue of celebrities he never heard of.  I recognize only three names, of all which are mentioned in the little book, as belonging to persons still living; but as I have not read the obituaries of all the others, some of them may be still flourishing in spite of Mr. Spelling’s exterminating onslaught.  Time dealt as hardly with poor Spelling, who was not without talent and instruction, as he had dealt with our authors.  I think he found shelter at last under a roof which held numerous inmates, some of whom had seen better and many of whom had known worse days than those which they were passing within its friendly and not exclusive precincts.  Such, at least, was the story I heard after he disappeared from general observation.

That was the day of Souvenirs, Tokens, Forget-me-nots, Bijous, and all that class of showy annuals.  Short stories, slender poems, steel engravings, on a level with the common fashion-plates of advertising establishments, gilt edges, resplendent binding,—­to manifestations of this sort our lighter literature had very largely run for some years.  The “Scarlet Letter” was an unhinted possibility.  The “Voices of the Night” had not stirred the brooding silence; the Concord seer was still in the lonely desert; most of the contributors to those yearly volumes, which took up such pretentious positions on the centre table, have shrunk into entire oblivion, or, at best, hold their place in literature by a scrap or two in some omnivorous collection.

What dreadful work Spelling made among those slight reputations, floating in swollen tenuity on the surface of the stream, and mirroring each other in reciprocal reflections!  Violent, abusive as he was, unjust to any against whom he happened to have a prejudice, his castigation of the small litterateurs of that day was not harmful, but rather of use.  His attack on Willis very probably did him good; he needed a little discipline, and though he got it too unsparingly, some cautions came with it which were worth the stripes he had to smart under.  One noble writer Spelling treated with rudeness, probably from some accidental pique, or equally insignificant reason.  I myself, one of the three survivors before referred to, escaped with a love-pat, as the youngest son of the Muse.  Longfellow gets a brief nod of acknowledgment.  Bailey, an American writer, “who made long since a happy snatch at fame,” which must have been snatched away from him by envious time, for I cannot identify him; Thatcher, who died early, leaving one poem, The Last Request, not wholly unremembered; Miss Hannah F. Gould, a very bright and agreeable writer of light verse,—­all these are commended to the keeping of that venerable public carrier, who finds his scythe and hour-glass such a load that he generally drops the burdens committed to his charge, after making a show of paying every possible attention to them so long as he is kept in sight.