Some Rare Things for Sale
An American writer has been complaining lately that his countrymen have lost the habit of reading. This is partly the result of that free trade in English books which is the only form of free trade that suits the American Constitution. People do not buy American books any longer, because they can get English works, mere printed rags, but paying nothing to English authors, for a few cents. The rags, of course, fall to pieces, and are tossed into the waste-paper basket, and thus a habit of desultoriness and of abstention from books worth styling books grows and grows, like a noxious and paralysing parasite, over the American intellect. In this way our pleasant vices are made instruments to plague us, and the condition of the law, which leaves the British authors at the mercy of the Aldens and Monros of the States, is beginning to react on the buyers of goods indelicately obtained. Even newspaper articles are becoming, it is said, a heavy and a weary weight on the demoralised attention, and people are ceasing to read anything but brief and probably personal paragraphs, such as “Joaquin Miller has had his hair cut.”
Footnotes
6 Except with worm in a summer flood.
8 Perhaps an Editor put this moral in?
16 The author once caught a salmon. It did not behave in any way like the ferocious fish in this article.
23 Mr. Wordsworth, in his poem of “The Recluse,” expresses a horror of this diversion.
37 It is a melancholy fact that the Author has quite forgotten what did happen! Thus a narrative, probably diverting, is for ever lost, thanks to the modesty of our free Press.
135 These remarks were made before the great discovery of some modern authors, that the best novels are those in which there is never a petticoat.
152 What was this anecdote?