in crowds as larks rise and darken the air in winter;** hundreds came to nothing, but hundreds stood, and of these nearly all reached a premium, small in some cases, high in most, fabulous in some; and the ease with which the first calls for cash on the multitudinous shares were met argued the vast resources that had hitherto slumbered in the nation for want of promising investments suited to the variety of human likings and judgments.  The mind can hardly conceive any species of earthly enterprise that was not fitted with a company, oftener with a dozen, and with fifty or sixty where the proposed road to metal was direct.  Of these the mines of Mexico still kept the front rank, but not to the exclusion of European, Australian and African ore.

* Two hundred new vessels are said to have been laid on the stocks in one year.

** In two years 624 new companies were projected.

That masterpiece of fiction, “the Prospectus,"* diffused its gorgeous light far and near, lit up the dark mine, and showed the minerals shining and the jewels peeping; shone broad over the smiling fields, soon to be plowed, reaped, and mowed by machinery; and even illumined the depths of the sea, whence the buried treasures of ancient and modern times were about to be recovered by the Diving-bell Company.

* There is a little unlicked anonymuncule going scribbling about, whose creed seems to be that a little camel, to be known, must be examined and compared with other quadrupeds, but that the great arts can be judged out of the depths of a penny-a-liner’s inner consciousness, and to be rated and ranked need not be compared inter se. Applying the microscope to the method of the novelist, but diverting the glass from the learned judge’s method in Biography, the learned historian’s method in History, and the daily chronicler’s method in dressing res gestoe for a journal, this little addle-pate has jumped to a comparative estimate, not based on comparison, so that all his blindfold vituperation of a noble art is chimera, not reasoning; it is, in fact, a retrograde step in science and logic.  This is to evade the Baconian method, humble and wise, and crawl back to the lazy and self-confident system of the ancients, that kept the world dark so many centuries.  It is [Greek] versus Induction. “[Greek],” ladies, is “divination by means of an ass’s skull.”  A pettifogger’s skull, however, will serve the turn, provided that pettifogger has been bitten with an insane itch for scribbling about things so infinitely above his capacity as the fine arts.  Avoid this sordid dreamer, and follow, in letters as in science, the Baconian method!  Then you will find that all uninspired narratives are more or less inexact, and that one, and one only, Fiction proper, has the honesty to antidote its errors by professing inexactitude.  You will find that the Historian, Biographer, Novelist, and Chronicler are all obliged to paint upon their data with colors