Religious Memoirs.

There are few things so strange, arbitrary, and unaccountable, as that amount of common liking and regard which we call popularity. Sometimes it answers to the touch of real genius, with a unanimity and readiness which, for the moment, might prompt us to believe in its decision as the true and infallible test of reputation; but ere we have had time to do more than observe the instinctive and universal impulse of this recognition, the popular fancy has gone mad after some silly wonder, or raised to its highest honours some superficial and worthless production, which we should have supposed incapable of moving to any sentiment whatever any single human mind. Nothing can possibly be more puzzling than this strange perversity. The applauding clamour of the vox populi ¹ – let disappointed men say what they will – is, after all, the culmination and apotheosis of same. Yet the same clamour rushes with unreasoning lavishness after books and persons which have no more claim to same, than has the smallest newspaper critic who professes to dispense it. In the world of books one has but to glance over the title-pages of those which bear the honours of many editions, to perceive the extraordinary freaks of this popularity, which bestows upon the most frivolous and commonplace performances applause as great as that with which it celebrates the most eminent works of genius. This fantastic uncertainty leaves us totally unable either to receive or to deny the authority of a popular success. It may be bravely won and honestly deserved – a triumph of real and genuine art; or it may be a haphazard ‘hit,’ which it is impossible to give any reason for, and at which authors and readers are alike astonished; but so purely unaccountable are the vaticinations of this oracle, that no one is justified in making a general conclusion as to the worth or worthlessness of its verdict. It is folly to say, on the one hand, that the highest productions of genius are unappreciated by the multitude; and it is still greater folly, on the other, to make success an infallible proof of desert. The decisions of the popular tribunal of literary criticism, are not at all unlike the decisions of that jury which regulated its verdicts on the purely impartial principle of alternation, and said guilty and not guilty time about, with a noble indifference to such small matters as facts or evidence. If we are disappointed of the verdict ourselves, we cannot console our mortification by the thought that it is always in the wrong, and never justly rewards a generous ambition: but that it is perfectly capricious, unreasoning, and unexplainable; that it is simply impossible to form any conclusion beforehand as to what its judgment may be; and that, often right, it still preserves a delightful independence, and keeps resolutely clear of the imputation of being always so, nobody acquainted with modern literature or opinions ever deny.